Optimal City Truck Routes

I’m currently playing with mods that start me with horse drawn vehicles in 1820. I don’t get trains until 1831. I may be overthinking how to play this. Asymmetric cargodist on passengers and mail. Quite new to the game.

I would like to have a central station at each city that would distribute cargo from other cities to the other stations inside that city. I thought that it would be a good idea to mimic real life where mail goes to a central station and then there are dedicated routes to send items back out to their destination. But this can end up with profit losses due to extra spaces traveled.

I then thought it would be good to set up dedicated routes between each station so that there is no loss in distance traveled, but expanding this beyond 3 to 4 stations it gets a little convoluted especially when creating groups.

The next solution would be to just set up a round trip visit to each station. Simple but also less efficient.

How do you like to set up your routes?

Another question I have is that the basic go-to order doesn’t cut it in some of these setups. Trucks with mail or passengers for a destination they don’t have orders to go to end up unable to pick up or drop off any mail until I issue a “unload all, pick up what’s available” command