Dealing with Congestion.

Most modern cities suffer from congestion, with roads, rail and air. It occurs because infrastructure is being used to the point where it is utilised at full capacity, and any additional vehicles will force a slow down. In railroad tycoon 2 congestion can occur, and can be seen when trains have to come to a stop because the track in front of them is blocked.

The costs of congestion

When trains start having to stop and wait for track ahead to be cleared, they are wasting time. This is bad for profits for two reasons:

1. The revenue payed for goods depends on how long it has been in transit. Increased journey times mean lower revenues.
2. Because the journey takes longer, maintainance costs incurred during that journey will be higher.

As you can see, decreased revenue and increased costs is not desirable for any business. If your railway is fairly busy, think carefully about adding an additional train. An additional train might slow down all other trains, and decrease their profits. So even though your new train might make a profit, it is possible for total company profits to actually fall. If your railway is busy, only add extra trains if they are guarenteed to make massive profits. (I define busy as the situation when you can see more trains than track!)

Improving line capacity.

Serious bottlenecks often occur at junctions. Rather annoyingly, railroad tycoon 2 doesn't include the feature of building flying junctions. In Europe, many junctions have to handle trains every few minutes running at high speed. These are junctions similar to that of highways.

Although you can't build rail bridges in railroad tycoon 2, you can effectivly do the same because of something I discovered, quite by accident. When a two railways cross each other at 90 degrees, hold ups occur because trains wait for the path ahead to be cleared. However, if they cross each other diagonally, and they don't share a square, then trains can go to and fro completely seperately of each other.