The Railway Tycoon — Wiki

How the game works: what drives demand, what you pay for, and how to read a line before you commit money to it.

What you will not find here are the coefficients. The demand model runs on the server and stays there, because working out which lines are worth running is the game. The same goes for the shares each kind of passenger holds on a given city pair, and for what any particular decision on your desk will actually do — those are things you find out by paying a survey or by deciding and living with it.

What is guaranteed is that the model is consistent and physical — real trains, real energy consumption, real distances, no fudged numbers pushing you toward a purchase. The wiki publishes principles and trade-offs, not the arithmetic. The rest you discover by running trains.

Pages

• Getting started — your first hour, on this page
• The economy — what drives demand, how pricing behaves, where costs come from
• Who rides with you — the five kinds of traveller, and what awareness does
• Lines and operations — opening lines, surveys, pricing, through ticketing, dispatching
• Fleet — choosing trains, interior layouts, fleet commonality, charter trains
• Wear, hours and checks — how trains actually age, and what the checks cost
• Energy and emissions — the market, the storage, and hedging with contracts
• Depots, HQ and staff — depot levels, moving the headquarters, ground staff and overtime
• Decisions on your desk — the judgement calls with no right answer
• Reading your numbers — satisfaction, complaints and who was really on board
• Stations — the station page, what a city's character means, and the World Games
• Awareness and campaigns — how people come to know you, and how station championships are won
• Result and cash flow — where each line of the income statement comes from, and why they differ
• The weekly timetable and competition — running while you are away, charters, seasons, streaks
• Facilities — the buildings that cut your costs, and how they wear
• The stock market — float, A- and B-shares, votes, selling your own stake, takeovers
• Train reference — every type, generated from the live game data
• Image credits — where the imagery in the game comes from

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Getting started

You begin with $300,000,000 and one depot. That is enough for roughly two intercity trains and a small handful of lines, which is deliberate: the first decisions you make matter more than any decision you make later.

1. Pick a depot that suits how you want to run

Your depot is the home station where every train begins and ends its day, and every line you open must start there. Three things about a station decide what it is worth to you:

• Size — the 1–10 class shown next to every station. Bigger means more demand on the lines leading out of it, and higher access charges. It is a coarse hint, not a number you can calculate from.
• Platform length — a station whose longest track is 250 m will never see a full-length freight train. If you intend to run freight eventually, start somewhere with 700 m or more.
• Position — a depot in the middle of a dense region has many short profitable lines. A depot on the edge of one has fewer, but less competition for them.

Large European and Asian hubs are the forgiving choice. A remote depot is a harder game and a more interesting one.

2. Buy energy before you buy anything else

You cannot depart without energy in store. Prices move every 30 minutes across a wide band — the same sort of swing industrial fuel and traction power really trade in — so the difference between a good buy and a bad one is a quarter of your largest single operating cost.

Buy emissions quota too. You can run without it, but every uncovered departure buys its quota on the spot at a steep surcharge, which is money you did not have to spend.

3. Buy one train, not three

A single train running a good line earns more than three running bad ones, and you learn the game faster with a fleet you can hold in your head. Pick something modern: the cost tables in the train reference are real, and a 2016 trainset genuinely beats a 1984 one per seat-kilometre.

4. Open one line and survey it

Opening a line costs a fee that scales with distance and with how busy the destination is. Once it is open you can see it on your network, but you cannot see its demand until you pay for a survey.

That is not an inconvenience, it is the game. You cannot compute demand yourself — the model is not published and the data behind it is not exposed — so every survey is a bet on whether a line is worth knowing about. A survey on a line you then abandon is money burned, and that is the cost of finding out.

5. Set your prices, then dispatch

Every line starts at the reference price — the price at which about 85% of your seats sell. Move the sliders and watch the forecast: raising the fare above reference empties the train faster than it fills your bank account, and dropping it below fills the train with passengers who are not paying enough to cover the trip.

Then dispatch. The service takes real time — a 400 km run is around two hours — and pays out when it arrives. Close the browser if you like; the money is waiting when you come back.

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6. Build the timetable, then keep coming back

Once a line is surveyed you place its departures in the weekly timetable, which runs them while you are away. The timetable keeps the railway alive; being here — reading the market, retiming departures, catching events — is what makes it grow.

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The loop, in one paragraph

Buy energy cheap, run trains that suit their lines, price so the seats fill without giving them away, and put the profit into more trains, more lines, and the facilities that make all of it cheaper. Everything else in the game — wear, reputation, surveys, the energy market, the rivals on your city pairs — is a pressure on one of those decisions.

Start your railway