I feel like it might be better to go for gold than what I did (silver), but a lot of money is already required to fulfil the rail-building and industry-buying requirements. Buying Indian Railways to achieve gold takes some pre-planning because its AI is an aggressive stock buyer. For silver you only need one good link for the cash needed.

I switched to manager Thomas Swann for cheaper territory acquisition, and bought rights to Punjab, Orisssa, the United Provinces, and Rajputana throughout the game (Rajputana only to get access to enough industry to purchase). I deleted the company's initial station in Panaji so I could make a nicer initial link, but maybe I should've tried sticking with it.

Probably didn't need to delete trains out of fear of over-saturating station demand. Not sure I needed to upgrade to Iron Dukes, either. Menuing could be faster.

Picked 100k plus 15% goodwill, instead of the other options (20% off track construction and early access to Truck Shay, or +25% goodwill and -25% overhead)

General stuff used: -You can turn the speed up or down before starting the level with the + and - keys -Esc exits windows -I turned off trees and turned graphics like trains and rails to visible from the outermost zoom level (this is less great in some scenarios, since it obscures the layout of plantations) -I used Livesplit, recording with OBS, Windows XP in Virtual Machine, Railroad Tycoon II Platinum Edition.