Railway Rivals Equitable Starts Calculator v0.1:

Locations:

Preferences:

Scoring:

Notes:

1. The start instructions on the map legend should be expressible via min and max players at each location.
2. Preferences are comma separated lists of up to 4 location numbers (blank if player chooses pot luck).
3. You can customise the scoring including a bonus for everyone getting at least 2nd choice.
4. Pressing Generate more that once should give different results only if there are equal best combos.
5. No combinations found (in the textarea) means that 5000 attempts have all failed. You may have impossible min / max conditions.
6. Max start locations = 8, max players = 6, these could be increased.
7. Validation / trapping of invalid values is pretty basic and may need improving.