When players buy stock, the spent funds go into the company’s treasury and can be used to build track. By developing settlements, you increase the value of stations, and a railroad’s income increases when it links to stations. When dividends are paid, the company’s income is divided by five (the number of shares) and paid to the owner of those shares.

After the sixth dividend, the game ends — but that final dividend includes bonuses based on the number of company links and is paid out solely based on the number of shares issued, not all of the shares in existence.

Players place square tiles onto the board to form rail lines. The object of the game is to make the rail lines as long as possible. Players start with a number of cars ringing the board. When a tile placement connects a car to a station (either to those on the edge or to the power station in the center of the board), that car is turned to indicate it has been scored and the player scores one point for each tile that the route crosses.
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Players also have a range of passengers who want to be taken to different destinations. One will draw these passengers at random from a bag when building passenger cars and certain locomotives. Players can then load passengers into any available passenger car. When passengers are delivered to their destinations, they will provide an instant powerful bonus!

Loading cargo and passengers into opponents’ trains is important on the Isle of Trains, as it’ll also gain a player extra bonuses that turn! But this will help the other train conductors get a little closer to completing their goals, by giving them the cargo or passengers, which they can then use for deliveries and big end game points!

The game ends when a certain number of contracts have been completed, or a certain number of passengers are delivered. Players win by scoring the most points, which you earn by building up your train, completing contracts, and delivering passengers. It is all about balancing the need to upgrade one’s train, with loading cargo or passengers onto opponents train for large bonuses, and delivering cargo and passengers to their destinations before anyone else. 

At the end of the game, a player’s score is the total of all of the points that they received from deliveries, from use by other players of one’s railroad links, and from the value of all of of a player’s railroad stock tiles.