I played a couple more games of Bindle Rails tonight.  I'm playtesting a few more mechanics to add to the mix, namely Managers and Industries. 

For the managerial end of the business, you can hire a manager by dedicating a card to looking for a candidate out of up to three people.  If you like one of them, you can hire them with further cards and they stay with your company to give bonuses here and there.  They can make acquiring technology easier, getting right of way from other companies, manipulating the stock market or getting additional VP's by directly throwing cards or getting credit for the routes you have already built added - all sorts of them.  There are seven of them at the moment and I'm busy tinkering with each one to see if they work out.  All in all, this additional component fits into the game nicely.  I'm somewhat surprised by this because I was afraid it would unbalance the game.  So far, it hasn't. 

As for Industries, I'm not sure if I like this part of it.  Basically, I was trying to exercise different parts of the map.  For example, I could have a product (steel) that needs iron and coal before it gets shipped out.  Each component is split into a from / to city.  The industries are built down the card in order and each route completed gives a certain amount of VPs.  Unlike Goals, VPs are not penalized if you can't make any of the routes, but you still need to spend cards to draw an industry.  Some industries are better suited to the routes and cities for certain Public Companies.  Others can be reached by all of them.  In practice, this has only given me a couple stray VP's - but that's better than none at all, I suppose.

For the record, my two scores playtesting so far have been 16 and 48.  The first game was an absolute disaster where darn near everything went wrong.  I thought I won the second one, but I was a hair short again.