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>takes days to complete a journey
>income is proportional to distance travelled
>passengers don't expect return journeys
>bigger stations have a bigger capture area
hmm, if I were going to program a transportation game I'd make a few changes to this formula.
There would be 2 modes.
1: A small scale map showing sections of routes in detail so you can design stations, build tracks through cities, bridges and so forth. The timescale ranges from pause to real time so you can watch neat steam locomotives slowly accelerate to an hour per IRL minute so you can observe multiple trains at a busy station and make sure everything is working correctly.
2: Once you have built something you switch to the large scale map which has lines for tracks and red dots where vehicles are. Here you build long distance rural tracks, manage business and time can go by faster so a year can pass in a minute or 2.
Your income depends on how efficiently you set things up as well as supply and demand. Imagine 3 locations, A, B and C, and it takes a train an hour to go from one to another. If you set a train going along the route ABCABC... it will record that it takes an hour to go from A to B and 2 hours to go from A to C and your passenger incomes would be calculated based on that. If you set another train going CBACBA, now it only takes an hour to go from A to C. The total time of a return journey will have dropped from 3 hours to 2 hours, increasing the quality of the service and demand. Even more trains increase quantity but quality doesn't increase as much (a train per hour vs 30 minutes) resulting in diminishing returns. The player observes all this, one step at a time, and uses the information to decide what to do next. If D is 3 hours away they might decide to have 1 train collect passengers at A, B and C before heading to D, and the travel time of A to D is recorded as 5 hours.
Freight is a mixture of fun industries (coal + iron = steel) and a town's goods along similar lines.
