Advanced strategy guides?

[pickpacket]

I almost always start in 1950 and locate a few high production coal mines in general vicinity to each other. Using trains I connect them to a power plant with feeder stations in between if needed, and in time I re-draw the route to power plants increasingly farther away. In this manner I usually make around £400k train income in 1952 and above £600k annually after that.

But are there faster or more profitable strategies? Are there guides out there for them? I'd like to break the £500k annual income by 1952 if possible, and I'd like to see how fast it's possible to get to £1m/year.

I'd also like to see tips for late game play. Around 2020 my primary industries are usually producing so much that my hub stations can't keep up, even having 12 7-tile station tracks of departing trains continuously loading and leaving and 4 7-tile station tracks with inbound cargo offloaded for transfer. The only way I can think of to keep up is to upgrade to monorail or maglev, but that takes *a lot* of time with huge traffic disruptions.

All tips are appreciated, but most of all links to guides and tutorials for different advanced strategies

[_dp_]

There aren't any guides for this playstyle but there are few recordings of good players, you can probably learn something from them.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHgsCHDChHw

Best start strategies depend on your game settings but it's usually with passengers. On novapolis/citymania 3h city-builder good start income was considered above £ 600k in the first year solo, 1m for a team game. Game started a bit later though, in 1985-90, with sh125 already available.

[odisseus]

Your starting strategy is already good. Here are a few additional tips:

• To save costs, build single track lines with passing loops. You can connect these loops and make a continuous second track later, when you aren't limited by the funds anymore.
• Short trains depart more frequently (at full load orders), and every departure boosts the station rating, which in turn increases the chance of production growth. Therefore, your feeder trains should be very short (3 tiles is a good length).
• On the other hand, your mainline trains should be as long as possible, so that you need fewer engines and fewer passing loops. Also, long trains make it easier to achieve high throughput in the late game.
• Your mainline trains can earn double if they haul cargo at both legs of their journey. However, this requires careful planning — in particular, you'll need to find two clusters of coal mines at a suitable distance, each cluster having a power station nearby. I'm not sure this is doable within the first two years.

If there are large towns about 100-200 tiles apart, you may also consider hauling passengers and mail.

• This can be at least as profitable as hauling coal, but the distance cannot be too large, because the payment rate drops rather quickly.
• If one of the towns is much bigger than the other, order your trains to wait for full load at the large town, then use the timetable to make them wait at least 10-20 days at the smaller one. The timetable doesn't have to be complete in order to function.
• If you play with Cargodist, make sure that your feeders all have "transfer and leave empty" orders. Otherwise, your main station will overflow with passengers that want to reach one of the feeder stations, and your money making scheme will become a huge mess.

In the late game, the railway efficiency depends principally on the train density that you can achieve while keeping the trains in motion. In a network that operates close to its limit, every stoppage inevitably causes a network-wide jam, which can take forever to dissolve. The art of building a high-throughput network is discussed in great depth at the Openttdcoop Wiki, but here are a few generic tips for you:

• Train acceleration rate becomes extremely important, its maximum speed not so much.
• Every train on the mainline should have the same top speed, otherwise a faster train will catch up with a slower one, and immediately brake to a complete stop.
• If you play with breakdowns, high train densities are outright impossible to achieve.
• If your network is becoming jammed, the easiest solution is building more tracks. However, if there's a bottleneck, adding more track in other places won't help.
• Two parallel but separate circuits are generally more efficient and more robust than a multi-track mainline.
• If your feeder hub cannot cope with the incoming cargo, build a second loading station nearby, and use boats in a canal to transfer some of the stockpiled cargo to the new station. Boat routes have unlimited capacity.