Lucky Train Facebook guide: tips, tricks, strategies, hints, cheats

Lucky Train is a new Facebook game by a brand new company (A Bit Lucky, Inc), and it's quickly becoming a hit among train enthusiasts and Facebook game enthusiasts alike. The goal is to build up your "county", making money using train routes, sending trains up and down train routes that you establish with friends, random Facebookers that you don't know, or your local county lords, such as the Baron. Build new buildings and trains and add stops to your routes in order to make more money and gain more experience, as well as add to your bonuses. These tips and tricks for Lucky Train should help you in your pursuit of building the biggest, richest train empire around.

There aren't really any cheats available for Lucky Train, at least none that don't require Cheat Engine, however there are many tips and tricks that can help you earn both experience points and money at a faster rate.

First of all, make sure that before you do anything in the game, after you complete the beginning tutorial, use the 'engineer finder' to both find more routes and to extend your present routes. This helps you to progress in the game even if you don't have a whole lot of friends, or any friends, who play this game who would accept an invite from you.

Once you use up all of your engineer finders, then you start needing to either send out invites, or already have friends who play this game, or else you're stuck at your given number of routes and route stops, so in order to make that particular upgrade, an easy way to go is to use one of the "add me" sites, or a fan page, of this game. Either post your name on the "add me" list or add people who have already posted their name on that list.

You can go two ways with the route extensions (as you have a limited number of route extensions). You can either extend one cross-country route by a ton of stops (I got one route up to 12 stops) or you can spread the extensions around. The advantage is, if you extend one route a whole lot, you get to upgrade to much better trains on this route (as your upgrades are limited by how many stops you have on one particular route), and load far more passengers onto the train. However, you will get one extra route bonus (in addition to the bonus for the amount of stops) for each route that you add an extra stop to, so for extra bonuses on top of bonuses, spread the route extensions around evenly.

Your passenger types will either provide a lot of experience (12-15) or a lot of coins (10-12), but if they provide a lot of one, they won't provide much of the other. Your initial passengers provide a lot of experience (from the cottages that are already built in your county) and more cottages are cheap (50 coins each), so at the lower levels, concentrate only on building cottages (don't waste any unnecessary coin, or even worse, lucky bucks, on bowling alleys, breakfast buffets, schoolhouses, or other buildings that release passengers who pay very little. Just build a bunch of cottages and then bank the rest of the money on upgrading trains.

Cottages are also very quick, easy and cheap to upgrade. They cost 100 coins to upgrade to level 2 and 500 coins to upgrade to level 3, and a level 3 cottage puts out luxury passengers (who pay 6 coins and give 12 experience points).

Later, as you get to the higher levels, you can spend more money on buildings that you unlock whose passengers pay more coin (E.G. fancy hotels, which release tourists who pay 12 coins per ride, or circuses and sideshows, which release performers who pay 10 coins and give 10 exp per ride). You'll make massive money this way, AND your money will multiply thanks to all of the bonuses accrued by having longer routes.

Easy way to gain a ton of experience points: Spend lucky bucks on the limited-edition graveyard, which is the only item in the game to release skeletons, who will give you 100 experience points per ride on the train. if you're going to buy one, buy one now before the Halloween season is over, when they'll stop being available. Right now, this is the only thing I would suggest spending real money on.

Decorations are merely for fun and to make your county look nice. They make no difference as to the price of your train rides.

Also, for the Halloween season, watch for people in ghost costumes to come out of your buildings. These are trick or treaters, and they will give you 20 coins per ride. 

If you have a limited number of high-dollar commuters, try to time them so that they end up on your trains that have the most stops, because this is how you'll get the highest amount of bonus money. 

Also, upgrade the trains that have the most stops first. More stops x more passengers = more money, faster, for less money spent on upgrades.

That's all for now. Got more tips? Post them in the comments!