Rail Route – Stuck in Station

How to Solve the Problem

The Problem

You have a couple of trains blocking stations with wait times in excess of 400-500 seconds sometimes instead of the usual 20-30 seconds etc.

The Solution

That will be the one-off Freight trains – which, as you have discovered, have a contract/timetable that involves waiting time at station platform for x minutes.

Be sure to check that on the schedule planning before accepting the contract.
It also tells you before clicking the contract, if you hover the contract button (stops for).

It could also be that in the schedule planning of a green (commuter/IC) contract, you clicked on later departure from one of the station planning a longer stop. Or the train arrives at the platform way before its arrival time occures – so it has to wait. Check the timetable for the station/train to find out what is going on. (send screenshot if you’re not sure).

You are right about the behaviour of the actual trains. You can’t make them depart earlier or change the departure time of the actual train. But you can change the time table of the next run (if you have unlocked it).

Note that the the time tables of the trial trains are based on your lay out at the moment of accepting the contract, and are always made with some ‘extra time’. Also the ‘final’ time table, that you ‘create’ by running the trial train, tends to get a ‘longer’ time table because all waiting times (for red signals) are included and all the times are rounded up to the next ‘full’ minute.

So (maybe also caused by later changes to your lay out (higher track speed and/or shorter routes on all or a part of your tracks) you can get time tables with some (or ‘a lot of’) minutes extra. As trains don’t travel slower the extra time results in longer waiting times at the stations. (The train arrives earlier and departs at the ‘time table time’.

Only way to correct that is to change the times in the time table for the next run.

A secure way to avoid this kind of problems is to make all your lay out changes (on one line/part of your lay out) only after you have unlocked 80 km/h tracks, platform changes and time tables changes and have enough money to do it in one go (pause the game and (re)build your connections. After that run some trains and write down the new travel times between the stations. And finally (based on your new travel times) change the time tables of all trains on (that part of) your lay out.