(James posted while I was drafting this, so I will need time to digest his points)
Hey man, your stats are wrong. Since I am able to play on after some changes, I'm not a leaver 
That's good news! Even from a selfish point of view, the longer you're able to use the UI, the longer I can.
Do you have any more tips to share? I know about water animation, zooming in, avoiding the network map, and resynching periodically. Anything else?
Also, you said that you are playing on your laptop but would like to stream from there to your PC. I said earlier that I couldn't make this work on Linux due to mouse latency, but, thinking further, I was trying to stream from a VPS in Germany to the UK, but you're just trying to stream across a room, so latency might not be such a big problem for you. So please don't let my experience stop you trying out
NoMachine or its rivals.
I feel I should speak up as the owner of Far East Railways. I run a large company, that I intend to expand further, because I enjoy building and managing large railway networks. I have a lot of time, and cannot think of a better way to spend it.
It's good that the game is working well for you

and your point is valuable. I also enjoy building and managing large networks, and I do so in single-player. But is that is the only viable playstyle on a multi-player server? What might (
tongue-in-cheek) be called the 'battle royale model'. Or is Bridgewater-Brunel is intended to be a place where multiple playstyles can flourish? I obviously have a selfish interest in this question, but I also enjoy discussing the economics of Simutrans and I intend to carry on doing that too!

I don't think any of the large companies at the moment are engaging in monopolistic behavior - though if we are, please point it out!
<snip>
I also think that the players on the server have shown a good capacity to manage and resolve conflicts. Two examples:
* A few years before you joined, there was an argument between Freahk and VOLVO, because (and, I don't know who started it) they were increasingly running duplicative routes and placing reservations in each others' "territory". As far as I know, they were able to resolve the conflict, withdrew most of the duplicative routes, and removed most of the reservations.
* I also had a small (and friendly, I think) argument with Freahk because I wanted to be the sole operator of a small line that he had built and we were sharing, as it connected to my main line. I wanted my services to be separated from his to prevent cascading delays. I recognised that I did not have a right to this and offered to give something in return, and Freahk suggested that I build a comparable railway elsewhere that he would become the operator of. This arrangement was a success!
Thank you for your really positive attitude, especially since I'm a newcomer to B-B. In my short experience, I have seen you and all the other players playing within the written, and unwritten, rules and with goodwill. But it's very common that systems can have unintended effects even when all the participants are trying to the right thing.
That is why I have raised the issue of land banking (companies buying land and not using it). The British journalist Robert Peston
once described Tesco's use of this strategy as "anti-competitive behaviour on a magnificent scale." So it's good you've explained more about and why this has become common on the server.
Your first example is very illuminating. It's
classic anti-competitive behaviour and would now be illegal for private businesses in the West. Even in 19th century England, it was unlawful at common law (though this did not really matter to transport companies because of their private acts). And I suspect point 5 of the B-B guidance was written to discourage territorial agreements. But it's completely within the rules and you're absolutely right to say that it's a good example of B-B players working together with goodwill for a mutually agreeable outcome. But I wonder whether the unintended (and inevitable??) consequence on a limited map is that after a while the whole map has been allocated and there is nowhere for new players to go. We have at least one potential player (Dr SuperGood) who has been excluded by this and I found it very off-putting.
On the server chat there was a suggestion that existing players should be able to maintain secondary companies that new players could take over. It's great that people are suggesting solutions with goodwill and I think it's worth considering. In economic terms, it keeps the existing cartel but permits new entrants. The downside is that, at least in my eyes, it's a lot less fun to take over someone else's company than to make your own (and I turned down two companies for this reason). I only took over the Insular Navigation Company because of its large bank balance, which is of course a highly questionable strategy!

Markers already require the purchase of the land below them - perhaps land is too cheap. I know that large companies such as the ones operated by Huitsi, Freahk and myself have bought or built mothballed railways on large tracts of land within or on the edge of towns. The goal is not to obstruct other players - although that can be a side-effect - but to prevent the towns from building in those areas. Once towns expand, they can create buildings that require demolition, buildings that cannot be demolished at all, and roads that can be costly and time-consuming to demolish. Expansion also causes the price of land to increase from 187¢ to 750¢.
About signs, I guess the main issue here is the need to kill huges amounts of people when building tracks in the town later on.
Thank you both for explaining why you use markers and how they are a rational response to in-game incentives. Implicit in your points is that this behaviour actually benefits all players (because more citybuildings means more passengers).
I agree that it's frustrating when
it becomes necessary to destroy a town to serve it. But personally I enjoy the challenge of finding creative engineering solutions to those obstacles, though obviously it isn't your cup of tea. This is certainly something to consider seriously, bearing in mind Vladki's very helpful
summary of the Sim-Ex design philosphy: "If we need to enforce some behavior to match real life, then it means that the simulation is lacking some aspect that in real life lead to that behavior."
However, it seems that there are also unintended consequences. I for one perceived the mothballed railways as a sign to stay away from those towns and Ranran found the misuse of markers frustrating. I imagine that you'd both be happy to spend a few hundred Simucents more per tile in order to increase the number of people enjoying Sim-Ex, but of course you shouldn't need to make that choice.
In the real-world housings would either be empty anyways or the inhabitants would move to another place.
Unfortunately 19th century railway companies were a major cause of homelessness because this did not happen

, but that's getting off-topic.
I am yet to fully read the post. Yet I notice yet another 52-48 split!
I changed the labels to Remain/Leave when I noticed that....
