A common mistake is to place your town hall next to your train station. However, the town hall is in my experience best placed at least 25 tiles away from the train station.

Workers can walk a maximum of 25 tiles to the train station. However, this restriction does not matter for the town hall. This means that the train station can be put up to 32 tiles away from the town hall. Leaving more space for residences.

The game doesn't specifically state it, however, most buildings do not need to be in range of the train station. This means that they can be put on the outskirts of your town, or in this example image, on the opposite side of the train station. Things such as the stoneworks and fishing docks only need to be within vicinity of a small storage and connected to the overall town roads to work.

While building, you will likely come across what is a not that hidden feature, but worth mentioning. You'll be told that the fishing docks need to be in range of the markets, but placing down a market by the fishing docks wouldn't put it close to the residential area. However, what isn't explicitly stated in the game is that all markets within the same town share inventory. Meaning that if one gets fish thrown into it, they all have fish.

As a final note for this guide. At some point you will reach a maximum amount of workers for one station. When you reach this point, you can then place down a second station connected to the same town and the two stations will have a shared inventory - doesn't apply to workers or coal fuel storage.

Now that you're getting established, you may feel ready to start upgrading your village away from the dirt roads into a proper town.

To unlock the ability to upgrade your village into a town, start by going through the unlock missions until you see the mission to produce 300 bricks. You can see on the unlock tooltip itself that it will allow you to make a town hall and craftsmen residence, these are upgraded versions of the village hall and the laborers residency and both have requirements for being upgraded and they introduce some new needs as well.

For the requirements, you can hover over the new "Upgrade" button on the interface when you click the building and it will show you what it needs.

Once you've finished that unlock mission, you can click the upgrade button and head over to your village hall. Hover over it with your cursor and you'll see a tooltip showing what you have and what is needed to finish the upgrade. You can of course also just click the village hall and hover over the upgrade button on the interface just the same.

If you, like I did in this case, only use a single town to get to this point, you should get this achievement when you upgrade. More importantly though, you'll now see the new and upgraded roads among a few other new structures. Keep in mind that while you can use the upgrade button to upgrade dirt roads to stone roads, you can't build the stone roads ontop of the dirt roads to upgrade them.

These are just personal thoughts and may not match your playstyle, but it may give some insight into how I easily got into clay with my latest save.

Maybe the biggest and most important lesson I learned while playing was to take it easy. You're in no rush and being fast means you can very quickly start seeing your town head into the spiral of doom with no ability to rescue it. If you take it slow, you can save before making larger changes and watch for a bit to see the impact of your expansions, it's also way easier to stop any spiraling.

Secondly, while a single town is definitely viable, at least to some extent, I would recommend expanding slowly. My newest and most stable save has two different towns and each town is starting to differentiate in what they do. It means less logistical issues and when I want to for example expand my clay production, I know which town to take the new workers from. Another benefit is that once you get into the stone roads, you can get workers from further away, so you can easily just expand the residential area without losing efficiency with overlapping station ranges.

When it comes to multiple stations, the game doesn't clearly display which station a building is connected to, which means that you can get into a problem where the bulding doesn't complain, but it is out of range of the station which handles workers. To solve this I would usually click the correct station and try to put decorations where its reach stops so I know what the maximum range is. The second station I usually add is specifically for industry as they may stick around for longer to unload and you don't want them to stop people from getting to work. On that, I do also use the "wait until empty" or "wait until full" on my trains because if it's not full or empty, it's basically just wasting a trip and causing more trains than needed on the track.

Lastly, your warehouse is the biggest bottleneck you have in my experience as you can only have one. Make sure you can place as many stations around it as possible. By building roads and bridges, you can connect multiple stations to the warehouse.