I'm very fond of a technique which services industry exclusively using rail. The concept is simple, industry can deliver freight directly via rail, as long as it has direct contact with a railway tile. No freight station needed. So if you have a tile which touches both road and rail, an industry which grows there can receive workers via a train station and deliver freight directly via freight trains.   My usual technique looks like this: The buildings you see popping up have both road and rail contact, and form the kernels of industrial complexes. They also block new industries from popping up where they would have road contact but no rail contact (such industries would be unable to send freight).   Then more industrial zoning is lain down:   and those seed industries expand:   Note that most those buildings have no road contact at all, and many have no rail contact. it doesn't matter, because they are extensions of the original seed industries and get their workers and send their freight through the original industry which does touch the road.   This got me wondering, how far can industry expand from a road?   No limit, apparently:   This is an industrial complex I built up using this method. It is the only dirty industry in the entire region. Note carefully that the entire industrial complex is being serviced via the single building touching the single street tile. All the employees come via the one train station. All freight leaves by the railway. This single industry employs over 12,000 sims. No, that is not that thing where a building inexplicitly has way more sims commuting to it than it actually employs, it's actually understaffed. According to the population graph this dirty industry complex has an employment capacity of over 17,000 sims. It generates over 1000 freight trains.   I have no reason to believe it wouldn't keep growing, except I've paused the experiment here because my dirty industry demand has become massively negative because of increasing education, so the growth has kind of stalled until I add a whole lot more R$ housing. In any case this behemoth is at least 15 times larger than anything I've grown 'in the wild' and the experiment has satisfied my curiosity. There does indeed appear to be no limit to how far an industry can extend from a road, and if there is a limit you'll run out of demand or your transport link will saturate before you hit it.   Note that this technique can do wonders for traffic management, as a single high capacity mass transit station or a highway stub can serve a vast area of industry.