In Factorio the only passenger on the trains is the player character known as "the engineer," and if your play style is anything like mine, you can run faster than your trains, so they just ship cargo.

I was being a bit facetious by bringing up Factorio, it's just my go to use case for train path designing, since Railroad Tycoon basically doesn't exist any more.

Also their point on distances stands since the largest Factorio maps would scale to be several hundred to a thousand miles across.