I've experimented a bit with the speed of trains.

Reducing speed to 33% isn't a lot of fun, but reducing to 50% certainly is!

At 50%, I'm spending far more time tinkering and optimizing. I'm planning far more ahead too - where I want which businesses, separation of freight and express goods (I do that in the vanilla game too, but more so here). And the added bonus is that I feel zero need for the pause function.

At 33% I had the game running at double speed for 12 years straight. Doesn't make much sense that way.

Just changing it flat-out does not really work to slow the game down in a responsible way.

One thing I only just realized was that the AI's penchant for using underworld employees and invention auctiuons needs to be dimmed down. They're so gung-ho on getting these that they'd rather spend money on those than a new line.

Innovation points need to come slower too.

There's many other things that need to be tweaked as well.

I've not gone very deep into the settings yet though, keen to hear other people's thoughts.