Freight Only

[OilCan]

I have not quite grasped the advantages / disadvantages of using the Freight Only option when selecting the cargo type. When would I use this and why would I use it?

In the same vein, I use the Express Only for passengers and mail. I know this makes the train cars carry a lighter load, so the train goes faster. This is good for passengers since they are always in a hurry. When and why would I use this for freight? It seems that I would want to carry as much freight as possible in a run.

I would appreciate any insight on this....

[Stoker]

I usually only bother to separate freight and express when there is an Express Speed goal to be reached. Use faster locos and fewer cars on your express routes and set them to have priority over freight trains in these cases. In larger scenarios it is sometimes profitable to run Express trains between larger cities, but in smaller markets making a single train as full as possible makes the best profit overall.

[nedfumpkin]

I also set my feeder trains as freight only, like a coal train coming down the mountain or something like that. Other times depending on volume, I might have a priority short all-express train for passengers and mail, then a bunch of long freight trains for all the other stuff. This way passengers and mail will be picked up even they aren't worth more than the freight.

Other times I will make my trains load specific so that I can ship what I want where I want ad not have to worry about the game sending cargo off in the wrong direction. Lumber is good for doing that since it is demanded by the housing but if you are trying to meat a weapons goal then let them live in tents! :)

[WPandP]

When trains load up according to "Any Cargo" auto-managed, I believe that it always tries to load the most valuable cargoes first. If you are trying to make sure that some freight gets moved around, you may want to allocate a heavy and slow engine or two to "Any Freight" service, so that you don't end up only hauling Mail and never Iron. Of course, if you're targeting a specific commodity then you can set it to a custom consist. But I use "Any Freight" all the time, dedicating the slow but powerful engines to carry as much as they can but setting them on lowest priority. Meanwhile, my middle-of-the-road engines are set to mixed consists and have the default midrange priority, and my fastest but lightest engines are set on "Any Express" and green-light priority.

If I am trying to move a specific cargo, like Iron, I'll custom consist it to haul 7 cars of freight plus a caboose; at the Iron Mine, the custom consist is maybe 5 cars of iron, 2 cars of any freight, and on the return trip it is 7 cars of any freight. At the iron mine, I set it to minimum 2 or 3 carloads, and this forces it to mainly haul iron but it will still run profitably when the return on iron isn't so great. Of course, at 3 loads min. it will still have to haul at least 1 load of Iron, so I usually stick with 2 because every now and then the value of a particular cargo will invert between source and destination, leaving that train stuck until the values balance out again.