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Also beware of "efficiency" dilemmas: You might think you are perfecting your routes by micro-managing pickups, but if you spam your mainlines with new trains, you could lose more to traffic jams than you gained in your stations. Finally, I enjoy seeing a map evolve over many decades as cities grow and tech advances. If I micro-manage, then that takes too long. If I create too many trains, then the engine-replacement years are too painful. So I give up some business opportunities in order to make the game more entertaining. I know, it's an act of will for anyone with OCD, but I make it happen because I know the payoff.

Micro- can give best profits, I played for years that way. But, finally I managed to relax my play a bit more and dabble in automation. Simplification was how I went about it. For express traffic I look for pairs of cities. These should be of about equal size and as far apart as practically possible, connected by as straight track as practically possible with no grades on the turns. I will go for max carriages, mix of mail and passengers. Wait to fill 4. For 4-house towns it will be wait for 3 out of 5. For freight, it's better not to mix cargoes. Highest revenue is achieved by dumping a full trainload of one cargo type. At this moment I would summarize 3 overall strategies for set-and-forget freight. 1. Use it just to provide volume to push city growth. Long distance express revenue is so much higher. Best use in the 19th century. Rising running costs and rot factor make this less practical for a modern game. 2. Industrialize. Buy the factories, and run as short and cheap service, both resource in and finished good out, with the maximum of volume. Focus on the industries. Industrial profits are perhaps a little less, but more stable over an economic cycle. 3. Work the chains as Jeffry suggested. The money maker is hauling finished goods a moderate distance. Manage those end-product demands as first priority. You are in control of supply via how many resources you hook up. Resource hauls should be as short as possible, minimize costs. This is the place to use wait-till-full trains. Then when converted you have a full trainload of say Grain -> Food. Often I will repeat the resource section, but alternate destinations. Food -> City A followed by Food -> City B. This gives time for demand to recover. The typical map has heaps of resources that are just for eye candy. Automation is accepting this is ok and for #3 to ignore even more of them. I have a plan for distribution ahead of time before connecting a new resource. A rare few cargoes*, including Food can work as long distance. But said journeys in the 20th century are best if not dead-headed on the way back. That means combining with a different chain. This makes the route more complex, but after a bit of practice it can be setup without headache. *There is some confusion in the documentation about distance factor. https://forum.dune2k.com/topic/23923-cargo-data-for-v156-ripped-from-exe-file/?do=findComment&comment=395629 At the moment the figures I trust most are in the data included with the download of Jeffry's US History map. PS. Sorry to say I haven't found time and/or worked out how to do the check I mentioned in the link.

I've only played v1.56 (and self-modded derivatives thereof), so all my notes come from that version. The game definitely has a bug in the map editor where deleting an event causes neighboring events to get their trigger and/or effects crossed up. NEVER do that. I have a note-to-self from maybe ten years ago warning myself to never delete trains, only replace engines. It comes from so long ago that I can't remember what caused me to write that. Maybe it was just that deletions would renumber all higher-numbered trains so that my to-do notes on a game would become confusing (things like "fix T283's route after next delivery" would no longer make sense after it became T279). On my US History map, I typically run 400+ trains from 1880 to present and beyond, so train renumbering alone is enough reason not to delete any. Replacing an engine on a train waiting in a station (or while reversing over a switch) will result in overlapping engine / tender / cars. The train may then become a runaway, speeding along its route without stopping at stations or exchanging cargo. The only escape is to either replace the engine en route (costs $) or give the train only one station with an empty consist (and even then, a folded steam-engine + tender might not be straightened out). The home-grown 1.57 patch fixes some broken internal data. For example, I think it fills in some missing demand recovery parameters for factory inputs that would become zero-demand after first delivery and then never recover. We know how to use hexadecimal editors to fiddle with bytes in many of the data tables within the RT2 EXE file. However, we can't change program logic, so logic errors remain beyond our grasp. If I knew more about decompilation and DLLs, maybe I could write some replacement functions (as someone did for a couple bugs in SimCity 4), but that's a little bit beyond my tool kit.