Is There an In-Game Advantage to Trains Servicing Multiple Stations?

[bleistift2]

Hi,

my current train network only contains trains that cycle between exactly two main stations—one per city. That means that a passenger who wants to travel from town A to town D has to switch trains in towns B and C. This allows me to fine-tune the number of trains between any two cities.

I’ve seen people who instead create train lines that connect multiple cities. While this is obviously more realistic, I wonder if this also has some in-game benefit. Do passengers, for instance, travel faster from A to D in such trains, supposing they still stop at B and C?

For the case of manual cargo distribution it’s obvious that the trains going through towns will dump all their passengers at any stop anyway, essentially mimicking the ‘one train—two towns’ approach, only with multiple train connections serviced by the same train. I’m interested in the case of symmetric or asymmetric cargo distribution.

Thank you for your time.
bleistift2

[jfs]

No, as far as I understand, Cargodist does not make any difference in route choice based on number of transfers. On the contrary, point-to-point routes rather than multi-stop routes are easier to manage capacity for.
If you're just going to for most efficient, keep doing point-to-point routes.

[bleistift2]

Hi jfs,

thank you for your insight.

Regards,
bleistift2

[Bigboss]

Hi,

In addition to being more realistic, I can see one advantage of servicing multiple stations instead of only 2: passengers going from A to D would have to unload and re-load at station B, same at station C. Depending on your choice of rolling stock, this may take a while as trains always have to fully unload. Your trains therefore stay longer in stations, which reduces your stations' capacity.
In congested cities where station expansion isn't possible, this can have an impact on station throughput.

cheers

[odisseus]

...passengers going from A to D would have to unload and re-load at station B, same at station C.
...as trains always have to fully unload.

That's not true. If you give the train a "no unloading" order, it won't unload at that station.

This leads to an interesting way of using through trains. When there are two clusters of towns which are far apart from one another, you can build the station in every town and join them in a loop, allowing the trains to unload only at the first station of each cluster. A train would visit each of the closely spaced stations in sequence, picking up additional passengers, and unload them all in the other cluster.

Here's an example. Suppose there are towns A1 and A2 located next to each other, and towns B1 and B2 located at some distance from the first two. The set of train orders will look like this:

1. Go non-stop to A1
2. Go non-stop to A2 (no unloading)
3. Go non-stop to B1
4. Go non-stop to B2 (no unloading)

Unfortunately, this won't work with Cargodist, as some passengers will be directed from A2 to A1, and these will travel the long way around.