Whoa... this game looks realistic at first glance, with locomotives and carriages modeled on real-world counterparts, but when watching the demo video, the railfan in me immediately starts screaming "No! This is all wrong!" - the track grades are much too steep, the curves much too tight, and that one scene where two freight trains almost collide and then one of them stops dead with a few meters distance to the other one - that's not how it works! I mean, of course you can build a less realistic simulation game, I think in this case it's just the disconnect between the extremely realistic-looking trains behaving in an extremely unrealistic way that bothers me...
Transport Fever 2 has a strong modding community doing virtual model railroading. There are plenty of mods improving vehicle stock, physics and procedures.
The gameplay is focused on logistics, so those aspects have a lot more control. I particularly enjoy that in conjunction with the model railway aesthetics.
- You build roads and railways, and stations for passengers and cargo (road/rail/air/sea)
- You set up 'lines' to connect various stations, and you can specify what and how much gets loaded/unloaded at every station (or whether vehicles on that line stop there at all), and how long vehicles should wait for their cargo
- You buy each vehicle and assign it to a line, and in the case of trains you also buy each component e.g. locomotives, passenger cars, stake cars, hoppers depending on what your line needs to transport
The cities grow by themselves based on the passenger transport links with other cities and the level of goods supply. There's no zoning, building water pipes, schools, or anything like that. Just the minutiae of getting things from A to B via C to pick up some more things destined for Y and Z.
The economic simulation is incredibly shallow sadly. It's a fun game and excellent creation sandbox but it's not remotely challenging or engaging outside of playing model trains. imo.
Run8 by Run8 Studios is what you want. I just busted 4 coupler knuckles during a boring meeting because I didn't watch my slack coming off while accelerating up a +0.10 grade :)
www.run8studios.com
And if you want to peak train nerd like me: raildriver.com
To be fair it describes itself as board game-like gameplay. The visuals are pretty but it doesn’t sound like it’s trying to be a simulator, very much a game first.
I'd highly recommend Railway Empire (and Railway Empire 2). It's the spiritual successor to Sid Meyer's Railroads! With a fair bit more content and features.
Don't be put off by the, uhh, legacy graphics and quirky UI, like Dwarf Fortress
it has the the depth of decades of development (and the learning curve isn't quite as murderous).
In the meantime, if anyone's looking for gamified railroad-building (just for fun), check out:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1124180/Rail_Route/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/1134710/NIMBY_Rails/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/503940/Railway_Empire/
Or several more: https://github.com/arcataroger/awesome-engineering-games/tre...