You have 1 oil well, and two refineries.  One train should be able to move the oil from the well, to a central station in a city, close to the refineries.  Two additional separate trains pick up the oil from this cargo station — where is has been transferred to — and take it to the refineries, and bring the goods back to the city on the way to get more oil.

The same thing should work for any other good in any other scenario.

As of right now, this kind of works as-is, but not 100% (I think there are bugs present too).  I have tested this with a lot of setups, but for this one we’ll continue with the oil one above.  If played out as above, the first train will automatically drop off the oil as the central hub with no manual command (even though there should be one!) because cargo will automatically take the shortest route to where it wants to go — if it takes less time, it works.  (Trains work better than buses with this — we’ll get to that)

Here’s where it starts getting iffy. The station will not correctly divide the goods up for the pickup for delivery-to-refinery trains, and will actually drop 99% of it off at whatever platform station the drop-off train happens to stop at (sometimes, 1 will walk across to another track for another line).  The final product is one train collecting almost all the oil for its refinery, and none goes to the other.  It seems the first one that is “connected” to the well in some way, will always be its favorite in terms of “what line I send goods to”.

In fact, even if TWO wells deliver oil to a station — drop it off — and then send it off to two refineries like before, it will still drop off the raw oil mainly on whatever platform the drop-off train happens to stop and unload at.

I think there needs to be a “Transfer Goods/Passengers” option in the line controls, which will unload all/seleted goods at the designated station — where they will then be seen as “fair game to be collected” by any other transport that come to said holding station for pickup.

So long story short, if anyone out there is wondering if this works, it doesn’t work well enough to use.  In the scenario above your better off having one train just go from the well to the refinery, and drop goods off in town on way back to the well.  Because the trains only work well in a 1:1 ratio in terms of drop-off and pick-up, it isn’t currently financially feasible to use a transfer goods setup widely.

I have had minimal success placing a truck station next to a train station that has goods dropped off, but isn’t next to industry in the city.  About 15% of the unloaded goods will “walk” to the truck station, if there is a line that collects from the stop near the station and drops at another cargo drop near where it wants to go.  It will only do this if the line exists, and the vehicles and purchases and moving (and costing you $$$).  Again, only about 15-20% of all unloaded cargo will do this (again, no real transfer option) because it seems the rest would rather just walk, even when it’s slower.

Comments, discuss please!  The more input we generate for this game the better!
–Holy