Train World: Intro to Reputation: How to Unlock Your Second Region

Train World requires you to get a high reputation score before it will allow you to unlock new regions. This can be quite challenging at first, especially on higher difficulty levels.

The notable thing about reputation is that you have to simultaneously maximize two things, and neither of them are profit — it’s a different problem to the game’s central making-money problem.

One thing is your trains have to be full. So your freight trains should use the auto-wait function, for example, to make sure they fill up completely at the loading station. If you look at each train’s detailed info window from the train menu, you can see a utilization percentage. You can also see the train’s utilization over time in the economy graphs section. Reputation is maximized when all of your trains are as full as possible: aim for 50% for freight as you’re usually going home empty, but try to get close to 100% for passenger trains.

Your passenger trains can be trickier to fill up. A common mistake is to allow them to leave the station before sufficient people have accumulated to fill up the train. You can just use the auto-wait function for passenger trains too, and that’s the easiest way at first: just have the train wait right there in the station for the passenger numbers to either hit max. accumulated passengers, or max. train capacity. The auto-wait function will cause the train to depart on whichever of the two conditions happens first.

Note that this strategy will start to get you in trouble later on as your network grows, as you will have passenger trains occupying valuable platform space, waiting for passenger numbers to build. In the long run you can either build more platforms (stations can be expanded after they’ve been built) and assign a unique platform to a train that needs to wait around, so that it never blocks another train from entering the station. Or you can build sidings on approach to the station, put a signal in the siding, and tell the train to wait at the signal instead of at the platform. It will then pull into the station only when the required number of people are already there.

One more tip for passenger trains: in the station dialog box you have the opportunity to get more passengers than the default by lowering the ticket price slightly. Supply and demand, right? If tickets are cheaper, more people will travel. Anyway, I have found that lowering the ticket prices to 90% of normal can be a great way to boost passenger numbers in the early game and get those full trains that you need.

(Full trains are also a very good idea economically because you’re getting income needed to pay those big maintenance fees, but that’s another story.)

The other thing you need to maximize for reputation is the satisfaction level of each connection. In other words, you have to actually deliver all the goods produced and all the passengers who want to go somewhere. You can get info on how you’re doing on this by going to map view, selecting the “Regions” button, and looking at the green bar for each connection (freight and pax) that shows what proportion of the goods or people are actually getting to their destination.

If you’re not satisfying a connection, you need a longer train, or more frequent trains. But usually the answer is longer, at least with freight.

Aim for a small number of max-length trains, each with appropriate use of auto-waiting where necessary, and you should be well on your way to getting that reputation score up.

Freight is pretty easy at first because there’s no traffic to speak of on your network.

For passengers in the initial region, you’ll usually have something like ABC in a triangle, and then city D that only connects to C. This makes eight connections total if you think about it (AB, BA, AC, CA, BC, CB, CD, DC). Get two passenger trains to handle four each of those eight. So have one train that goes from A to C to D, coming back to C, then returning to A to start the line again. The second train should handle the rest of the connections: A to B to C, coming back to B, then returning to A to start the line again.

That’s not the only way to do it, but it’s reasonably efficient and you should find that the two trains’ total journey times roughly match up to the 45 minutes or so it takes for max. passengers to accumulate, which means the system should work OK even without auto-waiting.

I hope this helps new players. The game really takes off once you start unlocking additional regions as then you have to start thinking about what kind of network you want, where your chokepoints are for traffic, etc.