Quick Start · Part 3 · About 4 minutes
Your first railway
Railways do not work like roads. A road carries traffic the moment it opens; a railway does not carry anybody until you also run a service on it. Get that one distinction wrong and you will spend a fortune on a line nobody uses.
A railway is two things, built separately
- Track
- The infrastructure between two settlements: a grade, a number of tracks, a station at each end, and a daily allowance of train paths. It starts costing maintenance the day it opens — and it carries nobody.
- Operating line
- The service that runs over that track: passenger or cargo, a path, which stations it stops at, a train length, a daily frequency and a pricing stance. This is what actually carries demand.
Build only the first and you have an expensive corridor nobody travels on. This is the most common railway mistake in the game, and the rail list flags it directly by counting the segments no service runs over.
What it actually costs
| Grade | Cost per km | Station, each end | Speed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $6,000,000 | $30,000,000 | 120 km/h |
| High-speed | $15,000,000 | $200,000,000 | 300 km/h |
Two things to take from this table.
Rail is not a cheaper road. Standard track is four times a national route per kilometre before you have built a single station, and stations are charged on top of the line.
Stations are free where one already exists — of the same grade. Extending from a settlement that already has a standard station costs nothing extra at that end. But a standard station does not satisfy a high-speed line, so going high-speed on an existing corridor means buying stations again at $200M each. A high-speed pair starts at $400M in stations alone.
Opening the operating line
The line editor sits behind a tab at the top of the rail build panel. The fields, in the order that matters:
- Service type, then train length. Passenger or cargo first — switching type resets the car count.
- Endpoints, chosen from settlements that have a station.
- Path options. Each shows its station chain, distance, time, and most usefully the maximum daily round trips it supports and which link is the bottleneck.
- Stop pattern. One checkbox per station. Skipping a stop makes the service faster for through passengers and useless to the settlement you skipped.
- Round trips per day, capped by that bottleneck.
- Pricing stance — see below.
Pricing is a stance, not a number
This is where rail differs most from roads. You do not type a fare. You choose one of three stances, and the fare is derived from it — because what you are really setting is how much of the line's operating cost the fares are expected to cover:
| Stance | Expected cost recovery | Fare band | Use when |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public service | None — the line is subsidised | 0.50–0.80× | The connection is genuinely irreplaceable and you accept paying for it |
| Balanced | Break even | 0.80–1.20× | The default, and the right answer for most lines |
| Commercial | About 15% margin | 1.00–1.60× | A wealthy, well-served corridor that can bear the fare |
Each stance is a band rather than a fixed price, so the fare moves within it as costs and traffic change. Balanced is the default and you should usually leave it there for your first line.
One trap worth stating plainly: do not reach for a cheaper stance on a line that is already full. A railway does not slow down when crowded — excess demand is simply not carried. Lowering the fare on a line that cannot carry more only enlarges the queue while shrinking the revenue. Add cars instead.
Next
Part 4 is aviation — the one mode you do not operate, where you build the airport and ask an airline to fly it.
For the whole railway model — interrupted lines, suspension, the policy comparison and tuning an overloaded service — see Railways: track and operating lines.