Congratulations on the success! Surely that's a record!
I prefer to play with rails than industry as well. But in order to play the rail side well it's necessary to pay just as close attention to the price maps than when for example placing a new industry. Look for the industries with a robust supply of resources and pay attention to where the cargo is naturally flowing.
The progression for a player seems to be to start with rails, realize the potential of industries, and then end up with a mix of rails and a little industry when he sees that he can take advantage of some of the best rail opportunities with less initial investment. Although, of course if you can build industries on multiple red stacks of resources there is little that can beat that, and if there aren't nearly enough industries on the map to process the resources available there is likely no substitute in the long run to building more as this will give you more cargo to haul with your railway.
I'm sure you have read about my rail profit methods in other posts. The main thing with rails is that when starting out with a small network of two or three cities, after the first few runs your trains will spread available cargo fairly equally between all the cities and there will be little demand for transportation. When I do a rail start I always have a plan of how those initial deliveries are going to provide enough revenue (with bonds if available) to finance a new connection. Then I will haul as much cargo as I can (from anywhere on my network) to this new destination which has a nice dark green demand for many cargoes.
The trap with rail is that after prices stabilize you still haven't earned enough/can't unlock the bonds to expand. In such case, to add insult to injury, cargo you deliver to your few connected cities will eventually drift away to nearby cities and as that happens the potential revenue you would earn by connecting to those cities goes down since their demand strength weakens due to presence of cargo. So you may get stuck again.
I always look very carefully at not only what I have to haul immediately, but how I am going to avoid these flat spots when I cannot expand after prices stabilize on my existing network. The most profitable cargoes to haul are normally the consumer cargoes (Meat, Alcohol, Lumber, Goods, etc.), but these are liable to stabilize in price quite easily. The resources are less profitable to haul since they are typically priced lower even though they can be more stable revenue since they aren't demanded by houses everywhere. A run from a couple of Livestock farms to a Meat Packing Plant can provide one of the most reliable revenues you will find. Milk can sometimes be a good idea too, but Milk is demanded at houses so it can suffer from price stagnation more easily. Obviously, we want to find a starting network location where we can haul as much cargo as possible. That should be multiple cargo types, so the more the better even if some of the traffic is the lower value resources.
Oilcan's custom maps are good. I always liked his style of economic setup which in my opinion has a simple elegance. Maybe it's just me, but I find it easier to find the natural cargo flows than in many of the default maps (especially the Coast to Coast ones). Also, the goals while being probably a bit harder than the campaign aren't super daunting.
- I just couldn't get into the game probably because I wanted a rail game and didn't consider the industrial side too much. Over the years I kept playing on and off but never got much further than the first room in the museum, and went off to play other games before coming back to it. 
