This page explains how money works in the game — what drives demand up and down, what you pay for, and where margin comes from.
It does not give you the coefficients. That is deliberate, and it is worth explaining why before you read further.
The single most important decision in this game is which lines are worth running, and the way you find out is by paying for a survey. If the demand formula and the underlying station data were public, you could compute demand for every station in the game in an afternoon, and the survey — along with the entire question of where to expand — would be worth nothing.
So the model is server-side and stays there. The raw traffic figure behind each station is not exposed by the API at all; try to read it and the database refuses.
What you get instead is a guarantee: the model is consistent and physical. Energy consumption comes from real train figures, distances follow the railway rather than the crow, emissions use a real combustion constant. Nothing is fudged to nudge you toward spending. If a 1980s diesel set loses to a modern EMU it is because the energy numbers say so, and if a line disappoints there is a reason you can find.
The energy price is the one number that is synthetic rather than sampled: there is no live commodity feed behind it. What it is not is arbitrary. It moves the way traction fuel moves — drifting, reverting towards a long-run mean, occasionally overshooting — and the scale of those movements is calibrated against real fuel statistics. That is what makes hedging a genuine judgement instead of a coin toss. Energy and emissions covers the market and the contracts.
The rest is yours to work out. Run the experiment, read the forecast, keep notes.
Demand is calculated per line, per day, per direction, and split across standard, first and sleeper.
What pushes it up: how much traffic both stations already handle. Big cities trade heavily with other big cities. This is why the busiest markets in the game are the busiest rail corridors in reality.
What owns the middle: the medium distances. From a few hundred kilometres up to around a thousand, rail is the natural way to travel, and city pairs in that band are the densest markets in the game.
What kills it: the extremes. Below a short walkable-drivable distance a line is worth far less than the size of its two stations suggests, and beyond the overnight range demand falls away steeply — past a certain point people fly, and no fare of yours changes that.
Premium demand grows with distance and with the size of both stations. Sleepers do not exist on short lines or into minor stations, no matter how large the cities — survey a short domestic line and the Sleeper column will read zero.
Daily demand is shared between every departure you run on that line. Two services a day each see half the market. Add enough frequency and the marginal departure carries too few passengers to cover its own costs. Finding where that line sits is one of the better puzzles in the game, and it moves depending on the train you use.
Every line opens at its reference price — the fare at which roughly 85% of seats sell. That is the number the sliders start at, and it scales with distance. First is a little over twice standard; sleeper is getting on for four times.
Move away from reference and the train responds. Raise the fare and you sell fewer seats; drop it and you fill the train with passengers paying less than they might have. The three classes are not equally sensitive: standard passengers react hardest to price, sleeper passengers barely at all. First sits in between.
Underneath the classes there is a second layer, and it is the one that decides whether a fare works. Your ticket price is not read by an average passenger — it is read by five different kinds of traveller who happen to share a train. A price hunter walks away from an increase that a business traveller never notices. A comfort seeker will pay above the reference fare for a coach that deserves it and will not travel at all for a cheap seat on a tired train. A brand-loyal passenger is choosing you before they choose the departure.
Which of them are on your line is what the survey sells, and it is why the same fare fills a train on one city pair and half-fills it on another. Who rides with you describes all five in detail.
You do not have to guess at any of this. The forecast beside the sliders is computed by the same code the server runs when you dispatch, so what it predicts is what you get. Move a slider, watch the load factor and the result, and you will map the curve for yourself in about a minute.
Note that low prices cannot summon passengers who do not exist. The train fills only as far as the market and your seat count allow.
Six things are charged against every departure:
| Cost | Driven by |
|---|---|
| Energy | Consumption rate × block hours × the market price when you departed |
| Emissions quota | Energy burned × a real combustion constant × the quota price |
| Crew | Block hours and the size of the train |
| Maintenance | Block hours and the size of the train |
| Track and station fees | An access charge per departure, plus a terminal charge per passenger |
| Passenger service | Passengers carried and distance travelled |
Block hours are the running time plus a fixed allowance for station stops, yard moves and terminal approach. A short hop pays that allowance over very few kilometres, which is why very short lines struggle even when demand exists.
Station fees come in two parts. The access charge is paid per departure and scales with the train and how busy the destination is — it lands on you whether the seats are full or empty. The terminal charge follows every passenger through the building. A big city terminus is expensive in both parts, but a half-empty train no longer pays for passengers it never carried. Small stations are cheap; they simply have fewer passengers to sell to.
Leasing, offices and non-operating staff are company-level costs and are not charged per departure.
At reference prices, a well-matched train on a decent line returns a healthy margin — considerably better than a real railway manages, because a game needs room for good decisions to compound.
It collapses in four situations, and every one of them is something you chose:
There is no hidden fifth thing, and no random penalty waiting for you. If a service disappoints, one of those four explains it.
Start your railway