This is a tricky one, but definitely needs to be addressed. A lot of people like the idea of having freight loading stations and railways leading directly into the city like the old city styles, however this plan and design creates more headaches than profit. My suggestion and I've always been successful with this mentality, is to provide "hub" points for your freight. What I mean is simply this (will provide pictures when possible) - don't bring train rail tracks directly into your city with freight; tourism only and even that should be limited to outskirts. Create a low density and medium street area on the outskirts of your outermost industrial area where the trains can come and pickup freight. If possible, have an avenue or large road that goes away from the city and routes all your freight traffic in a direction away from general tourism and citizen immigration. From there, create a hub with cargo loading stations and try to do this for every industrial zone you have.



If for some reason you should zone industrial near water and surround it with everything else, have a major avenue taking the traffic out to the nearest possible open area where you can create an access hub for more railways. Again, the idea here is to slow down traffic coming into the city and only have freight trucks carrying loads on the outskirts of the city. "Goods" trucks can take everything from there to the inner city. By slowing down industrial traffic and keeping it to the outskirts, you free up tourism and citizen travel on the inner city so that your commercial profits are much higher and noise pollution, lower.



The biggest mistake you can make is to have multiple freight stations spread out in the center of your city. I have seen this in so many you tube videos. It boggles my mind that anyone finds this efficient! But to really answer your primary question, the short answer is to separate your freight hub zones completely away from your industrial/commercial and force them to travel a little outside the cities to it!

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