Last Train Home - Advanced Tips

Not really beginner tips, those are easy to find; this is a bit more advanced.

Useful Tips

Got the Towing Bull locomotive with 4 infantry cars, you probably don’t need either. In the end I had 36 legionaries, picking up everyone I could find, that’s 3 fully upgraded infantry cars so you can probably do with sticking to Grandpa and upgrading it to 8 car strength
Even with the fuel inefficient Bull though I had more than enough coal for most of the journey but I did do every mission and scoured every map for resources.
I had to switch the locomotive for the final stretch because running the Bull on overdrive with all stoves on I ran out of coal halfway through and failed the campaign; had to reload an earlier save, got the Hound, got rid of the kitchen and workshop car and caught the boat comfortably within the time limit.
In the first north/south route choice I took the southern one, got the artillery car for free; I’m guessing you get more soldiers on the northern route but really, I didn’t feel I needed any extra soldiers at all; the artillery car is not strictly needed, you can accomplish all objectives in every mission without it but some of them are significantly less painful and resource/time consuming with a few artillery shells dropped on enemy tanks or commanders.
As for upgrades you do want both the levels of warmer uniforms done mid-game, the first car insulation upgrade on all cars (except storage, duh) early on and then the second + all three stove upgrades in chapter 6. The faster squad movement upgrade is probably good too. Everything else is take it or leave it, doesn’t matter too much.
You want the hospital car as soon as possible, healing your soldiers in infantry cars and with first aid kits is a pain; you probably don’t need many upgrades, maybe two more posts for doctors later on, to speed up healing, and one more row of beds if you really need them.
I didn’t upgrade my infantry cars for comfortable living at all and while I didn’t miss the health and morale recovery upgrade, the faster stamina recovery upgrade would’ve come in handy.
The kitchen car is not bad, you can double your food supplies cooking soups, I kept it running until the home stretch and never had any issues with food.
In the Gold Train mission where you’re supposed to deliver supplies to the whites I failed it but nothing really happened. Not sure what you get if you do deliver the supplies but it’s 200 rifle rounds, 50 food and 10 medkits which is not a small sacrifice at that point of the game.
From mid-game on it’s worth swapping your Tier 1 weapons for better ones; you can safely ignore the weapon-selling villages until then but at about the mid-game start checking them out them now and then; for example the difference between Tier 1 and Tier 3 machine gun is substantial
Don’t be afraid to start selling excess stuff early on; if you do every mission (or most of them) you’ll have more than enough resources and if you wanna buy additional cars you’ll need all the money you can get; hard to make more specific recommendations, for example I relied on stealth a lot so I had a lot of ammo to sell, might be different for you.