Reading a town

Select a town on the map and its panel opens. This page explains the parts that are not obvious: what the figures mean, and what to do about them. Where you have a station there, the panel also carries the controls for it.

Trains here

This lists the trains that do business in the town. Each row has a tag:

at the platform now means the train is at the platform here right now.
waiting for full load means the train is at the platform and will not leave until it is full. Its orders told it to wait here.
withdrawn (court sale) and stationed: needs orders mark a locomotive that is sitting at the platform and not running: one a court has taken out of service, and one bought from a failed railroad that has no orders yet.
stops here means its orders call here. Rivals' trains are listed only when they stop.
runs through means one of your own trains passes without stopping. You could add a stop here in its orders. Rivals' trains that pass through are not listed.

Select a train in the list to open its panel.

Station slots

A town has room for only so many railroads' stations. A small town has one slot, and a big city has several. The Station slots row reads like 1 of 3 taken, and full when none is left.

A slot is taken from the day a railroad orders a station, not the day it opens.
When every slot is taken, nobody new can build there. The town's panel shows who holds them. The only way in is to buy a station another railroad has listed for sale. That moves a station and takes no new slot.
Slots only grow. If the town gets bigger it may gain one. It never loses one a railroad already holds.

This is not the same as the Stations figure on your railroad's page, such as 3/5. That one is your charter's limit on how many stations you may own across the whole board. The town's slots limit how many railroads may be in one town. The station limit section explains yours.

Ready to ship

This is freight the town has made and no train has taken yet. Any railroad that calls here may load it, so it is open to everyone. Freight that waits too long spoils.

A line looks like Mail 2.5× → New York, $4.53 a car, and it reads like this:

The arrow names the town the freight is going to. Passengers and mail are often booked for a particular town. For other freight the game names the town it would send it to, and the line says no paying market in reach when there is none worth sending it to.
The price is about what one carload would pay when it gets there, after any fees owed to other railroads on the way.
The count is how many carloads are waiting.

A carload is one car full of freight. The game counts passengers in coaches and other freight in cars, and one coach is one carload. In the 1850s a coach holds about fifty travellers, and more as cars grow.

If a town has nothing ready, it says nothing yet. Freight appears over time, at the rate the Traffic list below shows.

Traffic

Traffic lists what the town makes and what it wants, for each day.

Produces is freight the town makes. This is what appears under Ready to ship, and what a train can load here.
Demands is freight the town wants. A train that brings it here is paid. Freight a town does not want sells for much less.

The figure beside each kind, such as 2.0×, is how much that freight pays compared with the base rate, per car and per kilometre. Base freight is 1.0×. Something marked 2.0× pays double, and 0.6× pays a little over half. Mail and passengers pay the most, and heavy bulk freight such as coal pays the least, paying for volume. Bulk freight pays less per car as the eras turn.

The number at the end of the row is how many cars the town makes or wants in a day.

The how you make money page says what else makes a delivery pay more.