Most management games tell you what you earned. The Railway Tycoon also tells you what your passengers thought, which is the number that predicts what you will earn next month. The statistics page is where a railway stops being a spreadsheet and starts being a business with customers.
Everything on it comes from the services themselves. Every departure records who was on board, how satisfied each kind of traveller was and — when they were not satisfied — what the main reason was.
The first thing you see is how each of the five passenger groups rated travelling with you. The groups are described in Who rides with you; what matters here is that they rate you on different things, so a spread of scores is normal and informative.
Advance-fare hunters scoring well while leisure travellers score badly is not a failure — it is a description of the railway you are running. It becomes a problem only if you are also trying to sell a premium product.
Watch the gap rather than the average. A railway where every group sits in the middle is one that has not committed to anything, and it will be beaten on price by a low-cost operator and on product by a full-service one.
The same passengers, sorted by where they sat. This is the fastest way to spot a class that does not belong on a line: a sleeper section with high satisfaction and almost no passengers is a section that is nice and empty, and empty premium berths are the most expensive space you can haul.
Low satisfaction in standard with high load is the opposite problem — you are filling the train by underselling the experience, which works until somebody else does it better.
Complaints are ranked by how many passengers they came from, and each one is the worst thing about the journey for that passenger, not a list of everything they disliked. That is why the list is short and why it moves when you fix something: solve the biggest complaint and the second biggest becomes the headline.
The reasons are the things you can actually change — the fare against what the line expects, the level of service, your reputation, how often you serve the line, the age of the train, and whether anybody had heard of you.
Praise works the same way in reverse. A group that scored well gets to say why, and the share tells you how much of your traffic agreed.
The useful habit is to read the complaints as a to-do list ordered by revenue rather than by severity. A complaint from a group that is two percent of your passengers is worth less attention than a milder one from the group that is half of them.
Three breakdowns: by group, by class and by destination. The group chart is the one worth studying, because it is the only place you see the realised mix — not what the survey said the market looked like, but who actually chose you.
The difference between those two is your competitive position. If a line surveys as heavily premium and your train comes back full of advance-fare hunters, the premium passengers went somewhere else, and knowing that is worth more than the survey was.
The header says how many of your departures had a survey behind them. Services on unsurveyed lines still run and still earn, but they cannot report a passenger mix, because the mix is exactly what the survey buys.
If that number is low relative to your fleet, the statistics page is describing a small and possibly unrepresentative slice of your railway.
See also Who rides with you and The economy.
Start your railway