[morkalork]

There's a BBC Nova episode about the soviet union with an apocryphal story about train schedulers being evaluated on the amount of cargo shipped by distance so of course, freight was sent on the least efficient route to its destination. Amazing to see the exact same metric get gamed again.

[number6]

German trains are evaluated on their timelines. If a train is more then an hour delayed passengers get their money back. So every train that runs into a high delayed is marked as "Cancelled" and if followed by an "Ersatzzug" that is curiously similar to the canceled train, because if the train is cancelled, the passengers don't get their money back if a Ersatz is followed promptly

[the_third_wave]

It doesn't work that way. Travellers are entitled to 25% restitution if they arrive at their destination station between 1 and 2 hours later than planned, 50% reduction if delayed by more than 2 hours. It does not matter how they arrive there, either using their originally scheduled services or some alternative ("ersatz"), it is the time of arrival that matters.

BYW, this is not just in Germany, the rule goes for many countries in the EU.

Source: been there, done that (too) many times.

[amenhotep]

I don't know if it was actually the most efficient strategy, but the thing I always liked to do in Transport Tycoon was find a coal mine etc in one corner of the map and a power station etc in the other one and build a line delivering between them - you got paid by the mile so when the train finally arrived the fee would be massive. Didn't realise that was actually an accurate (modulo apocryphal) element of the simulation :)

[taskforcegemini]

it's also what we do in Age of Empires 2 with our merchant carts.