Choosing Start Years

[Baldy's Boss]

What ingredients go into your choice of a start year?

I started out with Transport Tycoon in 1995 and 1930 was the default,so that sort of felt "normal".OpenTTD unfortunately followed TTD and thinned the roster of engines available in 1930 with its default start in 1950,so my early OpenTTD games generally began in 1940.I started working a bit back from there before I started adding NewGRF engine sets that have plenty of pre-1940 options,but so far the earliest-started games I've taken to 2051started in the 1920s.
I have a few early stage games started in the 1930s but have been actively playing various games I started at early dates that have a long way to go...Little Old World Red Railroad from 1901 is in 1971,
Jubilee Rail Group strated in 1887(Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee year) and is now at the day Edward VII died in 1910,
Green Victory RR started in 1865(the year the Civil War ended) and is now at 1887,
and Tillydean Grand Victorian started in 1837 (the year of Queen Victoria's accession) and is now at 1865.
What old in one game is new in another as fleet replacement always beckons.

Just wondering what periods have most appeal to others.

[Alberth]

Starting year has no meaning once you switch to newgrfs. You just start when the newgrf starts to provide sufficient engines. Usually I then forget to add trucks, and get stuck without early short distance transport options in the game

[Baldy's Boss]

So you believe in starting early in the NewGRF's life cycle so you see it all.
With eGRVTs you can add horse-wagons long before trucks arrive,but I'm a train chauvinist and generally only get into road vehicles if I buy other companies.
(In Green Victory I see tramways are available,I have yet to buy any but what properties recommend them?)

[Alberth]

So you believe in starting early in the NewGRF's life cycle so you see it all.

I like the early steam trains, until the point that I have "sufficient" tracks and "sufficient" cargo transport between industries, which is between 30 to 50 years later. Most NewGRFs (if not all) are longer than that

I don't upgrade tracks to mono or maglev, I add new tracks instead. NUTS allows that very early already. I still want to experiment with a central maglev transport backbone, and lots of non-electrified tracks to and from the back-bone. Unfortunately, in the early steam era there is no powerful maglev afaik, I might have to write a newgrf first to make such maglevs available.

(In Green Victory I see tramways are available,I have yet to buy any but what properties recommend them?)

For industries, it's short distance and not too much cargo. Iron horse(?) also has industrial small tracks which work better here, eg farms work nicely. In most cases, I use trams in the first leg of a feeder, visiting a group of industries, like farms, and collecting eg all live stock or crop.

[Baldy's Boss]

What of passenger trams then?
(Do passengers brought to a station by one vehicle stick around to board another or do they disappear?)

[Alberth]

What of passenger trams then?
(Do passengers brought to a station by one vehicle stick around to board another or do they disappear?)

That depends on your game setting.

If you have cargo-dist enabled for passengers, then some of them will disappear and all others go further either by another tram or by train. You can steer this by enabling loading and unloading at the vehicles.
If you don't have cargo-dist enabled for passengers, it's a regular feeder system, and you have to setup transfer orders.

See also the feeder system wiki pages at the openttd site.