zeffyr: I tried it yesterday and I don't get the rules - what am I supposed to do there? The tutorial is almost non-existent. Sorry for discussing in this thread, but mistermumbles doesn't accept chat messages.
Matruchus: Good writeup by Matruchus. A few things to add.
Pretty quickly, other shapes start to appear (other than circle, square, triangle). And the same ones don't appear often. So, say, you have a "+" symbol at one end of your city. You likely won't have many lines running at the edge of the map, so when someone from across town needs to get to the +, they will have to transfer to other lines to make it to their station.
Check out this screenshot:
http://static.gog.com/upload/images/2015/07/4672fd1a3ba656e8cd5f18846e4972289e829417.jpg The red line is too long, so it's bogging down under passengers. At the right side of that line is an overcrowded station. The dark grey in the interior of that lighter gray circle will advance like a clock and when it goes the full 360 degrees the game is over. Different cities experience overcrowding at different numbers of passengers.
You can redraw your lines as much as you want in Normal difficulty. I do this all the time. The Extreme difficulty eliminates this option, but must first be unlocked before you can play it.
In addition to extra cars and lines, carriages, and more tunnels, some cities give you 2 cars per turn (a turn is a week) and you can also get fast trains in some Asian cities. Interchanges are some other goodies offered up at the end of the week and allow fast transferring of passengers.
I tend to run out of tunnels quickly. All of the cities have bodies of water that need to be crossed. You don't have enough tunnels to make each line cross water even once. That's where a bunch of my rerouting has come - uh oh, new station across new water, but no tunnels left. :)