Wear, hours and checks

Trains in The Railway Tycoon do not age in years. They age in block hours and in runs — one run being one departure and one arrival — because that is how rolling stock actually ages, and because it makes the way you use a train matter as much as how long you have owned it.

The practical consequence: two identical trains bought on the same day can be in completely different condition a month later, and the one that did stop-start suburban work all day is the tired one.

Hours and runs

A long service accumulates hours and one run. A short service accumulates few hours and one run. Since the run is the punishing part for the hardware — traction motors, brakes, doors, couplers, wheels — a commuter unit doing eight round trips a day wears out faster than a high-speed set doing one, even though the high-speed set covers far more distance.

The game weights the two according to what the train is. Commuter and regional units are built for stop-start work and suffer less from it than a long-distance set would; a high-speed train put on short shuttle duties is being used against its design and the wear reflects that.

Wear

Wear is the running condition of an individual train, and it rises with every service. High wear does not make a train unprofitable in a subtle way — it makes it unusable: past a threshold the train is stopped until it has been checked, and no departure will be accepted.

You will see this coming. Wear is shown per train in the fleet list, and planning a check before the train stops running is considerably cheaper than discovering the ceiling on a busy day.

Checks

There are two.

An inspection resets wear. It is the routine one: the train goes out of service for a while and comes back fit to run. Budget for these; they are part of the cost of operating, not an emergency.

What it costs follows three things, and none of them is what you paid for the train:

The size of the train. A 900-seat double-deck set is a bigger job than a 70-seat railcar, and it is billed like one.
How worn it is. A check at 30% wear costs half what a check at 60% costs. There is nothing to do on a train that has just rolled out of the workshop, and it is free.
How long you left it. Above 70% wear the price rises by 2% for every further point. Deferring a check costs more, not less — which, together with the reputation you lose running above 70%, is why running a train into the ground is a decision and not a saving.

Older sets carry a surcharge on top of all three. The premise of the whole fleet page is that cheap old trains are cheap to buy and expensive to run, and the workshop bill is where you feel it: a 1970s diesel set costs more per departure in maintenance than a modern EMU does, despite costing a fraction as much to buy.

An overhaul is the heavy one. It resets wear and takes hours off the set's effective age — the full revision, bogies out, wheels turned on the lathe — which is the only way to make an old train young again. It costs accordingly and it takes the train out of service for considerably longer. Whether it beats selling the train and buying a newer one is a genuine calculation, and it depends on what the train is worth on the used market at the time.

Checks take real workshop time, and in a scheduled week that time is departures. You can let the auto-inspection rule catch a worn train whenever the threshold you set is crossed — same price, but whatever was in the timetable right then is missed — or you can plan the check into the week grid yourself, in a night gap or a quiet weekend, and lose nothing. The rule is the safety net; the planned service block is the craft. A workshop facility shortens every stay.

The maintenance factor

Here is the part that catches people out. Your maintenance costs do not depend only on the train being maintained — they depend on how varied your fleet is.

Every additional train family you operate raises the maintenance cost of everything you own. Every additional model within a family raises it too, by less. The reason is the same one that drives real operators to standardise: separate spare parts, separate tooling, separate fitter training, separate manuals.

So the railway that buys whatever looks good this week pays a premium on its entire fleet, forever. The railway that picks a family and stays inside it pays the least. The factor is capped — variety does not become ruinous — but it is large enough that a mixed fleet needs to be earning something for the trouble.

This is why the fleet page shows your families and models as a number rather than burying it. It is a cost you can only see by looking at the whole fleet at once.

Preferred suppliers

You can name a preferred supplier and get a discount on both parts and maintenance in exchange for committing to them for a period. It is a straightforward trade: a real saving now against a loss of flexibility later, and the flexibility matters most exactly when something goes wrong.

Practical notes

Plan inspections; do not react to them. The cheapest moment is earlier than it feels, and the price curve above 70% wear is steeper than the reputation loss suggests.
A commuter unit's real cost is in runs, so a timetable of very short shuttles is more expensive than the energy bill suggests.
Before buying a train from a new family, work out what it does to the maintenance factor on everything you already own.
An overhaul on a much-loved old train is sometimes sentiment. Check the used market first.