Unfortunately, as far as passengers and mail goes, railroad tycoon 2 does fairly badly in providing a realistic simulation. Passengers and Mail are treated like any other type of frieght, and houses are treated as industries. In the real world the output of a factory is dependant on the capacity of the factory. However, the number of rail passengers coming from houses dependant on all sorts of things, such as the destinations offered by the train, the speed of service, the frequency of service, the cost and so on. However, railroad tycoon 2 simplifies everything just by having houses producing a fixed amount of passengers and mail which ends up at the stations. When passengers and mail wait at the stations they will be picked up by the first train that comes along with appropriate carriages, regardless of the destination of the train. Now, imaging a whole load of passengers who wanted to travel but didn't care where they went. Imagine mail that wasn't addressed to anyone in particular, just as it travelled elsewhere!

If you have travelled on a train you will know it usually stops of at a number of stations, some people get off, some get on, and some remain on board. Because the passengers of railroad tycoon don't give a hoot where they go, everyone and all mail gets off at the first station which has a "demand" for passengers. As a result you might as well set up shuttle services which just go back and forth between towns. Also there is no need to make your train service especially frequent, it won't affect the number of people wanting to travel. Don't feel that you have to offer many destinations to your customers. You will get just as many customers by offering one destination as by offering 100 destinations. Silly I know, but I didn’t write the game.

Passengers and mail are more distance sensitive than any other commodity. The further you transport them, the more profits you will make. However, building huge amounts of track is very expensive, so I wouldn't attempt to offer trans-continental passenger services when you first set up. But once you are into the game, and you have made a lot of small connections, you may find that you could set up a long distance passenger service which mostly runs on your existing track. By doing this you can literally double the profits of your company because your getting all the extra revenue without having to pay for new track or additional track maintenance. Not only that but if you build hotels, restaurants and saloons at the stations you can nearly double the revenue. If your long distance train pulls into a fully equipped station, it can receive over a million dollars in revenue! For these types of trips, speed is of most importance. Try and get the fastest trains for long distance trips, because the quicker the delivery the more will be paid. Also a faster train will make more trips in a year than a slow one - meaning more annual profits.

In 1919 you will get an interesting little newspaper headline saying "Automobile usage exploding" and in 1957 an headline "Boeing 707 Invented," both of these indicate rail passenger traffic is set to fall. Now there are three different levels of passenger traffic in rrt2 designed to reflect the fact that the decline in rail travel has been different all over the world. High level is designed to reflect the European/Japanese situation and low level is reflecting the American situation:

The fall in passenger numbers does not affect the revenues but only the number of passengers available to transport. However, this is somewhat offset by the fact that towns grow and a town after 1957 may still produce more passengers than it did in 1880 because it has grown.

Certainly it is true that in North America the arrival of aircraft killed off passenger trains, because of the vast distances involved the Aircraft was much faster, leading to a sharp decline. In Europe passenger rail transport has remained fairly static without any decline. This is due mainly to the smaller distances meaning that high-speed trains (such as Thalys) can compete with Aircraft effectively since for short distances the journey time advantage is greatly reduced because of the time spent getting to and from airport. So really I think rrt2 should have no decline for the European model.