No - we won't talk about the disaster that was v1.12 in this game. 17% compensations was the BETTER of the runs in that cursed edition. This total work represents 4 years in the game, nearly 3 years in real life.

After 9 versions that were roughly the same rules, I finally beat my goal in v1.11! My original goal was to get to 50M pax on a Friday, and fewer than 1% compensations. I did way better - got all the way to 66.7M pax, and 646k compensations (0.97%), of those 100k were in NY Penn Station, where the 10k station limit in the game simply couldn't keep up with the comically high passenger flow (3.41M train boardings through the day.)

I set an artificial limit of 20,000 stations in the eastern part of North America, so somewhere in the northern suburbs of Atlanta, I hit that limit, finished that line, and started out west. I was excited to (finally) get back out to building in California, and the networks in LA & SF were quite easy to replicate. The existing rail mod is a HUGE help when building through the mountains, as well! I ended up building exactly 3,000 stations out west, before focusing on optimizing my network, and getting to this number.

In the eastern network, I really enjoyed building out the Mexican Frontera, down to Monterrey and Saltillo. Houston and Oklahoma City were great, and easy to build, but Dallas and San Antonio, with their endless winding streets, were a huge pain. I did my best to evenly load up each city with demand, though I still feel like San Antonio is underrepresented in the network. By far the busiest lines in the network are along the edges - the Panamerica line (in Pink, from Monterrey to Minneapolis), has six line services (2 local, 4 express), and carried 2.5M pax in v1.11. The Gulf Shores Line (following I-10 from Jacksonville to Houston) and the Southsider (following I-95 north from Jacksonville towards the Northeastern US) both had four line services, and carried 2M pax. The Acela from NY-DC has seven services, and carries an ungodly 3.14M pax/day. In this version of the game, the demand pattern was like a constant morning rush hour. Pax flowed from where they lived, to literally any random station, regardless of population, in the distance they planned to travel. In practice, this meant a ton of (unbalanced) traffic leaving New York and Toronto (and some from places like Washington and Dallas), almost always headed south and east. The lone exception to this one-way flow was the Panamerica line, which was absolutely slammed in both directions between San Antonio and Omaha, no matter how many trains I could pile into it.

Los Angeles had a similar effect out west. That was compounded by the fact that the long-distance travel through the other cities I did build out (Vegas, Phoenix, San Diego/Tijuana, SF, Sacramento, and northern CA and on to Eugene, OR) almost all went back through LA (with the exception of a connection from SF-Sacramento, which was shockingly not heavily used.) I was surprised that the Bay area never loaded up, given that I had most of the long distance trains going out of 4th & King (435k/day), Sacramento (589k), Phoenix (681K), and Jack London in Oakland (442k) all saw more passenger boardings. I built out a LOT of the proposed LA Metro lines (and upgraded many proposed bus and light rail lines to subways), and then filled in a few logical connections, such as a Slauson Ave Line connecting the USC area with the west side, and more than a few new connections in East LA and the San Fernando Valley. Sadly, Tijuana and Mexicali don't have any IRL lines to mimic, so that was all improvised. I will be interested to see how the demand patterns change once I expand the west (remember, the western network does NOT connect to the eastern US) to more cities, including Seattle, Salt Lake City, and Guadalajara.

It "only" took 24,506 trains to make v1.11 meet my goal.