1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

Strategies for building a successful transport network

First goods, then passengers

To make a good profit from passenger and mail transport, you need to use fast vehicles and have a vast network. When starting out you do not have sufficient funds either to buy the fastest vehicles or to build a big network, so you need to start small. The income also increases when the travel time in relation to the distance is kept short; but the income from transporting most types of goods is much less affected by this than passengers and mail. How much a goods type is affected is determined by its speed bonus, which you find listed in the goods list dialogue; the higher the speed bonus percentage, the more important is it that the goods type is transported quickly.

Due to the above-mentioned facts it is much easier to build a profitable network transporting goods; so that is what you should start to do. You make the largest profit by transporting manufactured goods to their end consumers, but if you do not supply the manufacturing plants with raw materials, you will have no manufactured goods to transport. It is therefore necessary to make sure that the entire chain from raw material supplier via processing and manufacturing plants to end consumers is in place; or the temporary gains you will make from supplying a part of the chain will soon dry up. There are several types of industry chains in Simutrans, their exact structure depends on the pakset you are playing. The simplest chains are directly from a single raw material supplier (such as a coal mine) directly to a end consumer (such as a coal power plant), but more complex chains will involve supplying a processing or manufacturing plant with several types of raw materials or processed goods which in their turn will need to be transported to another manufacturing plant to finally create a product that will need to be transported to the end consumer.

Do not forget that in Simutrans, goods are bought on contract! Do not just connect any raw material supplier to any processing plant, but the specific raw material supplier that has a contract with the processing plant in question - use the factory dialogue to determine which contracts exist!

Start supplying the industry chain from the raw material supplier and build your way towards the end consumer; this way you will not run out of goods to transport. It is often necessary to reload the goods from one means of transportation to another en route; if you need to do this, remember that goods will not start loading on your vehicles at the starting point until the entire transport chain to the contracted buyer of the goods is in place. Also, make sure that the interchange stop is capable of handling the goods category (goods, passenger or mail) that you are transporting - trying to make lorries reload on a bus stop will not work. You can check which goods categories a stop can handle in the station dialogue for the stop in question.

Passenger network

The profit that you can make from transporting passenger and mail increases dramatically as you connect more and more city and tourist attractions to the network. As soon as you have sufficient and regular income and have a little money saved up, start building a passenger network. Most of this money will come from fast connections between large cities, major tourist destinations and population centers. Trains are well suited for this purpose due to their speed and capacity. Once these main lines are busy and profitable, you should expand your network by setting up feeder lines to you railway stations; buses and trams work well for this purpose. These subsidiary routes may not make a profit in themselves, but the added profit to your main lines will more than make up for the small losses they invoke.

Postal network

It is more difficult to make money by transporting mail. You need to add capability to handle mail on every station on the postal network, this often has to be done by adding costly (both to build and maintain) post offices next to them; and the amount of mail to be transported is often very small. Some choose to hold off building a postal network until they have a profitable passenger network to cover the costs, others choose not to transport mail at all. Remember that if you wait to build the post offices, then cities will often have grown right up to your station, so that you might need to demolish city buildings to build the post office - this is costly in itself. Also remember that the post office will increase the catchment area of the station, so place it carefully.

---