After a few hours of sheer frustration I have found a great guide on how to better understand and play this new title. Kudos to the YouTuber for putting the video guide up for public consumption.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jx916-RKZwY

This is how I made 30 million in 20 years and paid off my loan.

Start on a small map if its your first game and and when the map generates look for a good starting city by making sure it has a good resource chain, at the very least a forest and sawmill close by, if you map has bad resource chains you will fail so just regenerate until you get a good starting town.

You need to consider how you will build rail links from your first town so look at a good place to put your first station and make it the full 5 platforms, I find it best to think ahead in how you will be linking up the towns and cities on your map.

Next help the city a little by adding a few extra roads to encourage it to grow how you want it to grow and while you are doing this think about how you will develop the tram system.

Its best to build your road vehicle depots in the same place for ease of access so put them near your station, lay tram lines right from the start even if you are only using stage coaches, if the city is big enough try to build an outer line and an inner line for trams and make sure there is a direct route to a tram station or stop right next to your train station.

Once you have your city transport sorted turn your attention to industry, I have found a great start for a town is steel production but it can be any chain, so create links from your resource bases to the processing plants just using basic road transport to start with, place large truck stops every time as once production ramps up there is no point having to replace small stops. You then want to link the processing plant to your industrial quarter of your city so industry can start using the processed materials straight away.

Repeat the steps above for 2-3 cities close by and consider train station positioning, once you have the third city up and running you should find you are already making a reasonable profit, if you have some lines running at a loss check for the reasons and consider selling 1 or 2 vehicles as you could be running a stage coach/ tram too many for the length of the line, it does however take a year or so to get a consistent profit going.

You will probably find you are quite a number of years into development and not built a rail line yet so now is the time to start joining up your cities and start running a passenger service, start simple and then build on it, it you have 5 platform station then you will have lots of room to expand. You will soon see passengers willing to commute to other towns and make you some well earned extra profit.

That is the basics to creating a good profitable base, do not be afraid to borrow more money from the bank should you need to because if you have developed cities well then you will be able to pay it back easily, just keep an eye that you don't get too ambitious and run out of money before you have rail links in place between at least 2 cities.

One other thing to be aware of is vehicle life and upgrades, make sure you set a vehicle to replace your existing ones in the line window even if its the same one, as soon as a new vehicle becomes available check to see that it is better than the current model, this may not be the case with every upgrade as it may be for example a new train has better pulling power but is slower than your current model, obviously its up to you to choose what you think is best.

The advantage of upgrading as soon as you can will be evident, a good example of this is when you change to steam trams, the city will start to advance quickly as soon as you change from your old stock. I noticed as soon as I changed the train station was upgraded along with many industrial buildings.

Once you have a nice profit its time to start having fun and experimenting with how your lines work.

I hope this will be a useful little guide to get you going :)

I'm playing in small-flat-easy map and found your guide is great. However big freight station cause traffic jam inside station easily when "wait for full" is set.

I suppose every map have some city don't receive finish goods by nature. Once the freight truck and passenger train roll the money in, supply those cites by train is profitable.

Still learning how to place single correctly. I learned the passing loop and it is easy. Once I double track and adding complex switches (e.g. from right most track switching to left most track before 5 tracks station, putting passenger line and freight line on the same track, etc.), things start to become chaos. Train wait for free path while the track ahead is clear. Put a signal to create a block section, it start to move and later on trains are facing each other when I added more train on track :)

Another difficulty I found is assign more train into existing line. Trains leaving depot does not go to the direction I wanted, which make the spacing unbalance (too much train on one side and less on other). I place the switch where allow go to both direction, but it seems the train won't switch track after leaving.

I don't set "wait for full" unless there is excess goods sitting on the platform, I often find I have 2-3 lines coming into a processing plant and 1 taking out the finished goods, keep them all on separate lines and it should run smoothly.

Sadly I've not had much time to play of late so not got around to the real complex stations but I am sure there are many ways to organise layout, my advice would be to start a new map and do some experimenting rather than do it in your main game map.