Every line starts at one of your depots. The opening fee scales with distance and with how busy the destination is — a slot into a major terminus costs several times what a regional station costs, before you have carried a single passenger.
Lines follow the rail network, and the network has edges. A domestic line is always possible. An international line needs the two countries to share a connected network on the same continent — and some networks are islands: Japan, Ireland, Iceland, New Zealand and a handful of others run excellent railways that no foreign train can reach. The one famous exception is the Channel Tunnel, which ties Great Britain to the mainland. Distances are measured along a realistic railway alignment, not the straight line on the map, so a line is somewhat longer than the crow flies it.
You can open a line you cannot yet run. Nothing stops you buying Helsinki to Lisbon on day one; the game will simply refuse every departure until you own a train with the reach for a line that long and the platform fit at both ends. Opening lines ahead of your fleet is a legitimate strategy if you expect the fee to rise as you grow, and a waste of money if you are wrong.
A new line shows no demand at all. To see it you buy a survey, and the price scales with the size of your railway — information costs more when it is worth more to you.
This is the central economic decision in the game. You cannot compute demand yourself; the model and the data behind it live on the server and are not published. So every survey is a bet: you are paying to find out whether a line is worth running, and sometimes the answer is no and the money is gone.
Some things you can reason about before paying:
None of that is precise enough to replace a survey, which is the point.
Prices are set per class and persist until you change them. Every line opens at its reference fare, and the forecast beside the sliders updates as you drag.
Beside each slider is a price band: the range the market on that line expects to pay. The band is not a rule and the game will happily let you price outside it. What the band tells you is where you stop being a normal railway on that line and start making a statement — well under it you are a low-cost operator whether you meant to be or not, well over it you are selling something the passengers have to be able to see.
Which passengers you keep when you move depends on who is on the line. Advance-fare hunters leave over a small increase that a business traveller never registers; premium passengers do not appear at all below a certain standard, whatever the fare. The five groups are described in Who rides with you, and the survey is what tells you their shares on this particular pair.
The forecast uses the same code the server runs when you dispatch, so it is not an estimate — it is the answer, given the train, the survey and the current energy price. The only thing that can change between forecast and outcome is the energy market and how many other departures you run that day.
A practical method: set the train you intend to use, then walk the standard-class slider from one end to the other and watch the result figure rather than the load factor. Peak profit is usually a little above the reference price on thin lines and a little below it on dense ones, but the shape depends on your layout and your train, so find it yourself.
Pick a ready train based at the line's origin and dispatch. Three checks run on the server before the service is accepted:
Then the outcome is computed and locked in. The service takes real time — block hours based on the train's line speed plus an allowance for stops and terminal working — and pays out when it arrives.
You do not need to be online when it arrives. Everything that came in while you were away is settled the next time you open the game, in one go. Closing the browser costs you nothing.
Railways in the same alliance can sell each other's lines. Put your name on a partner's line and you sell seats on a service you do not operate; put their name on yours and they do the same. The operating railway still runs the train and still carries the cost — what changes is that the line reaches passengers who would otherwise never have seen it.
This is the cheapest way to reach a market you cannot serve, and the cheapest way to give a partner access to yours. It is also a commitment: a ticketing partnership is worth having only if the partner runs the line properly, because your name is on a train you do not control.
Energy is deducted from your store at departure, so you must buy it in advance. Run dry and the departure is refused.
Emissions quota works differently: if you do not hold enough, the train still departs, and the uncovered emissions are bought on the spot at a steep premium over the market, charged to that service's cost sheet. It is a slow leak rather than a wall — but the spread between a quota bought at a dip and quota bought at the spot surcharge is real money on a busy timetable.
Prices for both move every 30 minutes. The spread is wide enough that timing your purchases matters and narrow enough that it cannot win the game for you.
Start your railway