How to build a big city:

I believe the key to the game and to build a large city is transportation of passengers.
It is wise to choose a city on a relatively flat land, without water nearby and with other towns nearby. When your town reaches a population of 5000 start planning ahead:
Build some busstations but be sure that their catchment areas do not overlap much.
This enssures that you get maximun coverage.
Then add a lorry loading bay and walk the station outwards so that you can add a 5x4 train station outskirts of the town. Put the lorry loading bay back beside the bus station.
Fund new buildings, even a couple of times a year, and do large advertising also a couple of time every year.
The advantage of this is that now your train station and tracks, and airport if you add one do not take up space but you can transport 1000 s of passengers a month because the game thinks the station lays in the middle of the town. This will help you increase the number of passengers that you can transport and therefore increase the size of the town quickly.
This is all very well, but the stations must be sufficiently serviced for this to be worthwhile.

You should control the roads in the town. They should not be to close together, to allow maximum density of buildings.
When a city grows outwards you should move your train station / airport outwards also, to allow the city to grow outwards.

How to build stations when you are told you cannotbuild any more stations in a town: simply delete all trees in the town and put new ones in their place. This will give you good ratings. Try now to build the station again.

How to increasing ratings with decoy train: If you have a station whose ratings you would like to increase, and have high on a full time basis, build a train with low running costs. Give the traina carriage for all the commodities which are waiting in the station. Add a carriage for a commodity which is NOT waiting at the station.
Then sent the train to the station and command it to full load. It will wait forever and never get a full load and will increase the stations ratings to around 70%.

To have more  than 2 airports servicing a town: Walk a train station outwards so that you have reached land outside of the sity authority zone. Then build an airport.

Good luck.
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