Railway Empire 2 – Beginners Guide

Guide for New Players (How to Start)

All credit goes to Dray Prescot!

In Shorts

The best way to make money once you have a good freight system is to add some passengers trains, and eventually to have a separate networks. Early on though, I find that mixed transport is really good in RE2 (vs RE1) to scale up the cities and at the same time make money from passengers.

In Details

Important note: A freight system doesn’t have good earning power. You shouldn’t build it first. Freight is a necessary nuisance.

The key to really unlock passenger/mail profits is single track. Active connections don’t have to be well-serviced for all relevant cities in your network to produce passengers/mail that want to travel to that location. A single train on the route is enough. I want to call this regional express.

Most game modes have tasks, and majority of these require growth, or at least a network in a certain area of the map. You should build out a double-track network to service these tasks. In those developed areas it makes sense to take advantage of full passenger/mail volume. How this plays out in the bigger picture is to a great degree determined by if you have region concessions. With region concessions there is more focus on better development in one area rather than a single track network all over the map.

Here’s an important tip: Make sure that supply trains that skip a city, for example A-C, or B-D, are set to Freight only. The game is not smart. If you leave this on Automatic, most regional express may wait for a single train that you have set with priority of freight items. While your dedicated express trains are starved. Except for special cases for tasks, express traffic should be simple A-B, B-C, etc..

Another tip: Mail is more important for your bottom line than passengers due to higher voluime. Just like it was in RE1.

New Concession and Freights

An easy way to deliver Freight to 2 (or even 3) Cities is Manual routes, You pick up 8 Wood/Grain/ etc. at A and then drop off 4 at B and 4 at C. While only using (paying to buy) one Engine instead of 2 Engines.

This is very useful when you have just opened a new Concession, probably because of a Set of Tasks for a Scenario, and you are dealing with several very small Cities, e.g. about 25k or so, that you want to get their growth going, in order to do some Tasks in the future. You only need to deliver 4 to 6 Resources and (basic, starter) Goods to each of those Cities, since that is all they demand. Usually you want to get them up to 30k to build an Immigrant Center, and then 40k to open up additional Industrial Slots.

Later when the Cities are larger, you rearrange your Train Routes to those Cities, using more Engines, in order to reach 60k population so you can build Libraries for continued growth.

By then, you can start getting the Express Track and Station network going to generate larger revenues than freight.