1. Start game in western USA, the easiest theatre.
   
2. Find two towns on the coast that are close together and have harbours.
   
3. Build the first station at the town you are most likely to build from again in the future. Then build the second station.
   
4. Select the Map level (F2) so that you can see with ease what supplies needs to be picked up.
   
5. Build a train with one mail and one passenger car.
   
6. Once you have enough money, start to improve your stations with the following extras: post office, hotel, switching yard and restaurant.
   
7. Repeat steps 1-6 when deveoping new lines and stations.
   
8. When you can afford it, buy 10,00 shares of your own treasury stock. This helps to prevent other railroads from buying you out.
   
9. Its a good idea to build from cost to cost as you get a $100,000 bonus for building a transcontinental railway.
   
10. If you do well enough to exceed station limit and you find that you can't expand anymore or your status stops increasing, try and take over an enemy railroad. This is not an easy task, but if you have enough money in the bank ($5,000,000 should be enough) you can usually do it. The best railway to take over is the one that hasn't bought much of its own stock - 20,000 shares at the most.
    
11. Buy-outs mean you have to be very fast and alert. Call your broker and buy 10,000 shares of your target's stock. As soon as you go back to the map, call the broker again and repeat the process until you have 60% of his stock (make sure he doesn't have enough money to block you out). If he has to sell a $500,000 bond then you should be able to take him out.
    
12. Depending on the level of play you can take out 2 or 3 other railroads.
    
13. When you have done all of this you should be offered the top job for your theatre. In the unlikely event that this doesn't happen, you should start to make new railroads, build new stations and make union stations between your railroad and the railroads you have taken over.

• Rivers are key factors in evaluating where to build initially and where to expand. The cost of building bridges and the danger of washouts is significant. New York is a difficult location on the map, due largely to the layout of the rivers. Rivers are less troublesome in the Western US since they tend to flow east-west more than north-south. England is least affected by rivers.
  
  
• Ferries can be a great way to do an end run around a competitor. Build the ferry line around the blocking position, then run down to a city 'behind enemy lines'. Build a station with an engine house and you're ready to start a second railroad. Don't forget to tear up the ferry line to get a lot of your construction money back.
  
  
• Mountains are a major issue in the eastern and western US. In the eastern US you have to deal with the mountains early on (about one-third of the way across the map). Since you reach the mountains early, you tend to have weaker locomotives, which makes the mountains more of a problem. How you deal with the mountain question in the eastern US is often a make or break decision (especially as you're building on the northern half of the map). In the western US you dont hit the mountains until you are two-thirds across (assuming you're playing an east-to-west game). You have more time to build up cash for assaulting the mountains than in the eastern US. Since the exact shape of the mountainous region varies from game to game, the location of optimal mountain passes changes each game. The outlines of the land, the rivers and the locations of cities remain the same in all four scenarios.

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