This is a ongoing playthrough of great and charming Mashinky game.
I decided to show case and play test my mod
https://gtm.steamproxy.vip/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=2388832554
I will update this as I play and as I improve my mode.
Stay tuned!

Here is my setup:
Nothing too fancy: 256 map, medium hills, low density of industries and towns.
I wouldn't use "single depot" option, however in game I will connect all my depots to main grid before I will use them.
My seed is 1785020840.
I'm starting from Early Steam Age and will progress through ages by payments.

Let's see what we got here:
4 towns at bottom, 3 towns at top - this give us 2 starting points. We need a lots of money, so better to start near some towns.
Also we got 3 toolworks, and these need in order to progress. This will give us second point of interest. We want a coal mine and sawmill nearby toolworks, and a forest nearby sawmill.
Toolworks at the left looks promising.
So my plan for the game looks now like this:

Let's put some rails!
I'm starting from Atlanta, this is a nice descent town with 11 population. I put my station blueprint on top of the town with SE approach. Under that I put sub-to-main line connection for early game. I use early-game versions, because regular one are quite expensive and we need a stable cash flow before we could afford them. Also I draw a main line. This would be a main line, because I want to connect with it all my towns, so cash flow always would be high.

Next town that I want to connect with my network is Jacksonville, its on SW from Atlanta:
Station, join and conect all that to main line. Put lights. Put actual stations.

All stamps for stations comes without actual stations. Because in early game you need to adjust a position of station. Later with upgrades you eventually fill up all space designated for station.

Next item in the list - depot.
I place it near Atlanta using the same join.

This is what we got so far:

I buy 2 trains and here our first happy passengers!

Ok. First route is done. What's next?
See, we have fresh flow of money tokens, but it's quite low.
We need to collect more of these.
Let's connect to our network big city at right and small city at left.
City at right could be connected as an end of main line, or as a sub line. I decided to do as subline, because main line I want to connect to cities on north.
But, as you see it's quite expencive, and I already short on tokens. So I decided to build only necessary tracks in order to upgrade it into join later.
It works really well, so I decided to include new stamps into my set: turns that could be upgraded into joins.
A little bit of waiting, and big city has been added to our network.
And now we are starting talking:
Given this more steady flow of tokens I've bought more trains, added small town and started moving to north-west.

Let's take a look into that north-west part of the map. I want to connect this part with main line, but I don't want trains with heavy cargo slowing down traffic in main line. So I decided to connect all industries there by sub line, and connect that sublin to main line.
Let's start planning:
Station near tool factory, turn from main line to sub line, upgradeable into join.
Given this layout, let's place more joins: one for saw mill, one join for two forests, and one join for all of this to tool factory.
Let's place stations, and connect all by tracks:
As you can see I decided to move forest join a little bit to left, because I want also join coal from bottom here as well. And I'm waiting for tokens to build cross with tunnels. This cross loks usefull, so I decided to add this as stamp as well.
Here the complite and final looks of resource sub line:
Now it's time to buy some trains and put them into work.
While I was waiting them to start delivering goods, I decided to upgrade some of the joins into more robust one - with tunnles. I've done that, but found out that it's not easy task. I need to delete all rails in join and than place a new one. It's not convinient, so later I will show how I fixed this.
And quick review of cash flow so far:
Next steps would be: advancing to next era, more wood and coal tokens, adding new towns and metal production