A station is a place, not a three-letter code. Click one — on the map or in any list — and you get its page: who runs trains there, who the people there have heard of, and what sort of city it is.
The facts. Name, city, country, size class and platform length. The platform is the hard limit: a station whose longest track is 250 m will never handle a full-length freight train, whatever you are willing to pay. The size class is a coarse 1–10 hint about how much traffic the station carries.
What you will not find is a traffic figure or a demand estimate. Those exist, they drive the whole model, and they stay on the server. Working out which lines are worth running is the game; a survey is how you buy the answer.
Your presence. Your awareness here, the lines you run through it, your depot if you have one, the ground staff load if it is one of yours, and any campaign you are running. See Awareness and campaigns for what those numbers do.
Who runs here. Every railway serving the station, how many lines each of them runs through it, and whether it is one of their depots. Counted from lines rather than from departures, so computer-run railways appear too. What any of them earns is not shown, because it is not something you could find out by standing on the platform.
Who they have heard of. Awareness at this station, highest first. This is the one competitive number that is public, and deliberately so: a brand nobody outside the company can assess is not a brand.
The climate, in words rather than a score:
| Word | What it means |
|---|---|
| Open | Nobody serves it. There is usually a reason — check the platforms. |
| Quiet | One or two railways. The demand is mostly theirs, for now. |
| Contested | A handful share it. There is room, and somebody will notice you. |
| Crowded | Six or more, or a very dense network. Money is made here, but not at list fare. |
This is derived from two counts anybody could make: how many railways run here and how many lines they operate. It is not a difficulty rating out of a model, and there is no number behind it to optimise against.
Some stations carry a visible label:
The label is public and it tells you which way the passenger mix leans. How far it leans is not published, and it is not derivable from anything on screen — it is part of the demand model, and a survey is still the only way to find out what a specific city pair actually holds.
A line between two labelled stations carries both characters. Nice to Frankfurt is a holiday line and a business line at once, and it fills differently in July than in February.
Every six weeks a host station is announced, and the announcement comes fourteen days before the games open. During the week of the games, every line with one end at the host carries 50% more demand.
The warning is the mechanic. Everyone is told at the same moment, in the same news feed. Whether you have a depot within reach, a spare train, and the nerve to open a line on the strength of an announcement is the entire decision. Nothing stops you from opening one on the last day either — you just catch less of it.
The skilled computer-run railways read the announcement too, and you will see them move. That is intentional: a world that does not react to its own news is scenery.
Start your railway