Mixed car trains?

[Pinstar]

I have two cities, A and B on the sub arctic map.
City A produces food, which city B needs to grow. City B has a gold mine and passes by two other gold mines on the way back to city A, which has a bank.

Since I want to keep my station ratings high for all four cargo types involved in this route (Passengers, Mail, Gold, Food) I've been including at least one car of each type on the train, with the rest of the cars being gold and food. The idea being that once these trains fully saturate the line, they'll be registering a pickup for all four cargo types at the relevant stops, keeping station ratings higher. Am I being clever here, or am I hurting my passenger/mail profits by mixing them with the other cargo types?

[Redirect Left]

Am I being clever here, or am I hurting my passenger/mail profits by mixing them with the other cargo types?

Doing it all in one go is fairly good, however you may get more profit from a larger train carrying exclusively one higher paying cargo, than mixing smaller amounts in one go, that is if there is demand and extra cargo is left at the station.
In terms of station ratings, you may also be harming that, if there is a lot of cargo left at the station, due to the train not carrying much of that at the time. Ratings tend go down faster if there's lots of waiting cargo. More information on station rating is here.

But to answer the question, the answer really is "it depends", i feel.

[Eddi]

the main problem with mixed trains is that it is difficult to balance the number of cars so each cargo is carried efficiently. the main advantage is that the train never runs empty.

there's no obvious decision which one is better.

[Pinstar]

the main problem with mixed trains is that it is difficult to balance the number of cars so each cargo is carried efficiently. the main advantage is that the train never runs empty.

there's no obvious decision which one is better.

I'll normally slot in 1 car of each 'flavor' and then fill the train the rest of the way with another. So if my food inventory at town A was building up too high in my previous example. I would make a train with 1 passenger car, 1 mail car, 1 armored car and the rest food cars.

Unless this is an arterial passenger line, I find myself often not needing dedicated mail/passenger trains. If every cargo train takes 1-2 cars of passengers and 1 car of mail, that often naturally keeps up. At least in the early -mid game.

[CTarana45]

I generily place Train's that carry both Lumber and Goods between a Forest and A Sawmill!

Christopher Tarana