You're gonna wanna start off with simple freight in the early game. Transporting passengers isn't particularly profitable unless you really know what you're doing.

A quick way to earn some profit at the beginning is to have a train line between a coal mine and a power plant. Once you have that set up, you can tweak it with additional, more modern trains if there's enough excess supply at the coal mines, and you can branch out to other industries like petroleum and whatnot. Once you have a stable profit margin, then you can enlist some passenger busses.

Also, make sure you don't have any unnecessary stops or roads/railroad tracks lying around. The maintenance costs of those can add up really fast if you're not being careful. I'd also advise not to build an HQ at the beginning of the game; it costs a ton of money in operational costs and, as far as I know, doesn't actually do anything.

Imagine you started a game with 11 small cities and a sufficient public road network, so all you really need is depot and bus stops. Say you build bus stops in only two cities. Not getting into details about the distance factors and how it changes over time, in each of the two cities, you would only see a tenth of the potential pax, since nine out of ten would like to visit cities not connected yet.
So there won't be that many busses that use your stations in the first place. For this thought experiment, our busses will wait on full load, so whenever they move, they are full. A full bus moving pax a straight road from one station to another makes money, but less and less the more detours it goes. In theory even busses that can't make money at all could exist and still be useful to fuel other modes of transportation, but let's assume that's not the case here. So if the busses make money, how can you lose money? It's because of the stations (and any roads if you buildt them). So vehicles don't only have to make enough money to pax for themselves, they also have to make enough money to pay for the infrastructure - ways and stations - they use. In this case, one bus line has to pay for two stations. You mentioned that your stations were tight together, which even adds to the effect as you get paid for distance travelled.
The solution is to build a third station in the third city, so you can set up two more point-to-point lines. You get a new ratio - instead of one line paying for two stations, three lines pay for three stations. If you put a station in every city, you can have 55 lines paying for 11 stations, so each line pay a tenth of the sum that was needed with only one line.

Of course you would not have 55 lines, since pax are willing to change vehicles, but the point is that 55 times as many pax are generated and can be transported, whether on additional lines or in additional vehicles on the same lines does not really matter.

As a side effect of connecting the cities, they will start to grow, and at some points busses are not capable of moving so many pax. That's when you can start with trains, replacing the most used lines. Of course, you have to keep in mind that busses don't have to earn much extra money (a fifth of a station), while trains need quite some (the first one about 8 station at length 4, plus all the tracks).


Now as you can see, the more you invest, the more you get. That's why people will tell you to start with the good old coal-to-powerplant line - It does not need a lot of investment and still has a decent output, which you can use to co-finance first pax experiments. Plus, you would already have rails which the coal trains pay for, you might use them for a first pax-train as well.

I made a really goood profit from doing just crude oil by train with 110 or 105m3 per train and made.. tons by doing crude oil to a nearby oilfired powerplant so you wont need to worry about the production backing up since it is just a consumer.

It also changes from pak set to pak set. I prefer to play german 64, because the profit is verry limited. And you can start in the mit 1800s. Does anybody know another good, hard pak set for early start?

I've played the base game 4 times and Pak.Britain 16 times. Starting in 1930 with 24 cities, 2000 median population, 24 industry and 16 tourist attractions. I've never found a viable freight route, in fact freight is the least profitable option, and with the right setup of city routes I've maneged to make it through 4 years before going completely backrupt. As far as I can see there is no option to make any profit even if individual routes are profitable, the overheads at £5000 per quarter just erode everying. Might try playing post 1950 and see if it makes a difference. At least with both Transport Tycoon and Industry Giant with the right city distribution you could eventually get a world that worked.

(What I do to get some profits) Try enrouting every city in your map in the same route, like a long way circuit, make it like a circle and then you'll see passengers who get in the bus in the first stop but stay there long time anyways. You'll need many vehicles because of the high volume of passengers but they'll be at 70% occupancy most of the time, you'll get profits but maintenance will keep high (that I don't know how to deal with).

Does passengers can change bus ?

Say I have a bus station in A to B another to B to C, does a passenger can take the bus on A, and change vehicle to make to C ?

Originally posted by Marc Cassin:

Does passengers can change bus ?

Say I have a bus station in A to B another to B to C, does a passenger can take the bus on A, and change vehicle to make to C ?

Yes they will transfer, up to the value of max_transfers in the simuconf.tab file (normally around 9 times).
However they will always take the route with the least transfers, so they will not go A -> B, then B -> C if you have a direct route from A -> C

Yes, I imagine, I'd not do that in real life ^^

Thanks, I'm still trying to make money in pak128, and if I still manage to, I'll switch to pak128E, nothing worked so far :/

There are many vehicle paks on the internet from the Japan and HK community, these vehicles usually cost very low to run (like 0.1c/km) which is great for beginners.