Every seat you sell is sold to somebody, and not everybody wants the same thing. The Railway Tycoon splits the people on a line into five kinds of traveller who look at the same fare, the same train and the same railway and reach entirely different conclusions about whether to travel with you.
That split is why there is no single right price. A fare that fills a train on one city pair leaves it half empty on another, and the difference is not the distance — it is who lives at either end.
Advance-fare hunters care about one thing. They compare your fare against what the journey ought to cost and walk away from an increase nobody else would notice — they will move their travel day by three days to save eight pounds. They have never heard of your railway and it does not bother them. If your strategy is volume at a low fare, these are your passengers, and they are loyal to exactly nothing. They do want a choice of departures, though, and for a reason that has nothing to do with convenience: one train a day is one price, and there is no cheap seat to hunt for.
Season-ticket commuters make the same journey twice a day and want it to be there when they need it. Frequency matters to them more than any single thing matters to anybody else in this game — with a train every ten minutes they simply walk to the station without checking a timetable, and with one every two hours they buy a car and never come back. A line served once a day is a fundamentally worse product than the same line served three times at the same fare.
They notice a shabby coach slightly and forgive it quickly; they stand for twenty minutes and read their phone. On the railway they are a far bigger share of the world than they ever were in the air, because the morning train into the city is the product the whole industry was built around.
Leisure travellers are paying for the journey to be pleasant, and on a railway that means something different from a flight. They sit for four or seven hours looking at the interior rather than at the back of a seat, so they notice worn stock more sharply than your business travellers do — a fact that catches out anybody who arrives here from an airline background and puts the tired carriages on the long weekend service.
They will pay above the reference fare for a coach that is worth it, and they are the group most likely to book a sleeper: a night on the train saves them a hotel room, which is an argument no first-class cabin in the sky has ever been able to make.
Regulars choose a railway before they choose a departure, having built their week around your timetable. Reputation is the single biggest thing in their decision, and on a railway reputation means one thing above all others: punctuality. They will forgive a fare rise long before they forgive a train that does not turn up, and once they have stopped trusting the timetable they plan around somebody else's.
They are the hardest group to win and the most valuable to keep, because they are the only ones still there after a competitor undercuts you.
Business travellers pay well, but — and this is where the railway parts company with the airline for good — they are not captive to price. A first-class passenger on a transatlantic flight has no alternative; a business traveller on a 300 km rail corridor always has the car, and under about 400 km the car frequently wins. Raise the fare far enough and they simply drive.
What holds them is not the catering. It is frequency and punctuality: a meeting at eleven needs a train that leaves at a useful time and arrives when it says it will. They are a small share of most lines and a large share of the revenue on the ones where they are present, and a First coach run where they are not is the most expensive empty space in the game.
There is one compensation. A business traveller with a single sensible train on their corridor will board it even if they have never heard of the operator, because the alternative is four hours behind the wheel. They are less put off by an unknown railway than your leisure travellers are — the leisure traveller can simply decide not to go.
The mix is not the same in September as it is in July, and the shape of the year is one of the clearest places this game stops behaving like an airline one.
An airline's peaks are July and the week before Christmas. A railway's best month is September — the schools have gone back, the offices are full, and the commuter flow that pays for everything is running at its heaviest. July is the weak month, not the strong one: the commuters are on holiday and the people who are travelling are flying somewhere warm.
February is the deepest commuter month of the year and the thinnest for everybody else, which makes it the month where a pure commuter operator is at its best and a leisure operator at its worst. April, May and December lean the other way.
None of this changes how much demand exists — that is the survey's business. It changes who the demand is, and therefore which train, which class mix and which fare the line wants that month.
The five groups are not secret; the page you are reading describes them. What is secret is the mix — what share each group holds on a specific city pair. That is what a survey sells you.
The mix shifts with the line. Two capitals with heavy business traffic carry premium and brand-loyal passengers in numbers that a leisure line to a seaside town never does; the seaside town carries advance-fare hunters who would not have travelled at all at a higher fare. A short hop between neighbouring cities is full of commuters. None of this is derivable from the map, the station sizes or anything else visible in the game, and it is deliberately not published here.
The reason is simple: the survey is the best mechanic in the game and it is worthless the moment demand can be worked out on paper. So the wiki tells you that advance-fare hunters react harder to an increase than business travellers do. It will never tell you how much harder, or what share of Stockholm–Gothenburg they represent.
A railway nobody has heard of is not the same as a railway with a bad reputation. The first is invisible; the second is known and disliked. The game tracks both, and awareness is per line, not per company.
You build awareness on a line by running it. Serve it regularly and people at both ends learn that the line exists and that you operate it; stop running and the knowledge decays. A brand new line on a brand new railway starts from nearly nothing.
Awareness does not touch everybody. Advance-fare hunters and commuters do not care who they ride with — the cheapest seat at the right time is the whole decision. Leisure travellers care somewhat. Brand-loyal passengers care enormously: an unknown railway loses them almost entirely, because loyalty to a railway you have never heard of is a contradiction.
This asymmetry is the shortcut a low-cost operator gets. If you compete purely on fare, you can grow without ever building a brand, because your passengers were never going to choose you for your name. The price of the shortcut is that you are permanently locked out of the passengers who pay the most.
See also The economy, Lines and operations and Reading your numbers.
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