Growing towns...

[CaptNemo]

When I play, I like to grow towns.

So a small town will say: "Town grows every 200 days."

No matter how many passengers, mail, and goods (or any thing else) that I supply to the town, it always stays at "200 days".

Is there a setting that I can turn on to make this variable?

How do you get towns to grow faster?

When I 'fund buildings', the time drops to 58 days, the population bumps up a little and then the growth all goes away after the bump.

[jfs]

Are you also transporting passengers/mail from the town? Larger towns grow faster too. The best way to grow a town is to have a frequent bus service inside it.
If you can afford it, you can keep funding expansion for the town, since one funding period only lasts for a limited time.

[BobMem]

As far as I understand it, you need 5 stations each receiving cargo at least once a month, in order to maximise town growth rate.

In this case 'stations' means any type of separate train, bus, vehicle, ship, plane station. It's important they are 5 individual named stations. A single station which handles trains, buses and ships only counts as one of the 5.

Cargo is anything you can transport, including passengers.

[jfs]

There is this article on the wiki: https://wiki.openttd.org/en/Manual/Towns#town-growth

But one thing it does not mention is the specific effect of having active stations in the town:

For a normal town, without "fund new buildings" active:
No active stations: Rate 320
1 active station: Rate 420
2 active stations: Rate 300
3 active stations: Rate 220
4 active stations: Rate 160
5 or more active stations: Rate 100
Yes, having just one station in the town is actually worse than having none.

When "fund new buildings" is active, the difference between zero, one and two stations disappears. Then the rates are:
120, 120, 120, 100, 80, 60