Railroader

TL;DR This is a game which you didn't even know you needed or wanted. But you do. Badly.
So my first thought when I looked at the screenshots was: cool, a train simulator. I mean, it's gonna be ETS2 but on rails, right?
Well, yes and no.
It's a _railroad_ simulator, which at first introduces itself as a train engineer kind of thing. Then it tells you that, ackchyually, it's more about logistics than merely pulling brake levers. Now, my experience with steam trains is limited to robbing one a couple of times in RDR2, so when a torrent of anglecocks, waybills, interchanges and gladhands arrived on screen I thought that it's only going to be for the proper railfans, but then I've discovered AI engineer orders and fuseés.
And everything finally clicked into place.
Railroader is just a giant sandbox model railway, where you choose your own fun and pace. In meta-speak, there's a system of 'missions' to be fulfilled, map unlocks, gear upgrades and reputation system to maintain. Logistical puzzles to be solved. Route planning to do. Finances to take care of. But most of all there's a marvelous sight of meticulously modelled thousand tons of steel on wheels chugging past you at 35mph, which makes you stop and forget what you were doing for a few minutes.
Thanks Devs.
I needed that

-Updated on 12/20/2023-
Let me be clear from the start. This is a railroad game, *not* a train simulator. The focus of this game is not so much on operating the locomotives, but managing and organizing a railroad. The locomotive simulation is basic, but decent at the current time of the Early Access Review. Locomotive simulation may be expanded in the future, but my review is just what the game has in the current state, and not what it could potentially have.
The key thing this game delivers is modeling on how railroads actually operate. You are picking up and dropping off cars to industries and a connection to another railroad. Railroads are not in charge of loading and unloading rail cars, that's the responsibility of the industry. Therefore, with the exception of the logging industries and passenger service, you are not going to be hauling the same cars back and forwards to the same points. Most industries are going to only have one or two cars and can sometimes take days to load or unload. They may also have days where there are no cars needed to be sent to them. At the same time, once the cars are empty or loaded at the industry, they need to go back to the interchange.
It sounds really simple, but it is actually quite the deceptive puzzle with different solutions. One example is that the sidings are often dead ended, and often the car you need to get in the siding is on the wrong end of the locomotive, requiring you to either find another siding to run around or try your luck in "Dutch dropping" where you get a running start, decouple the locomotive, speed up even more to get a gap between the locomotive and car, throw the switch and let inertia carry the car to where you want it. High risk, but can be quite the time saver if you get it just right. Another puzzle you may have to tackle a little bit later in the game is organizing and planning your trains. A route between two towns may have a decent grade between them, and you need to get over a thousand tons of cars over it. Do you buy a larger locomotive, or do double-head with two smaller locomotives? Or how about cutting the train in half and making two trips up the grade? The choice is yours. In short, there's a lot of problem solving, but I think the game does it in an engaging way.
The game does require some knowledge of railroad operations. Switching and a basic understanding of the air brake systems will go a long way in helping people to understand how to play this game. For instance, the air hoses just like in real life are designed to disconnect when stretched out and are not manually disconnected. It is not a bug or missing feature. :-P
I am going to put in some of my caution statements here. First, this is not a fast game to play, and is definitely one where you'll need to dedicate several hour long sessions to play. While I am pretty fast and good with kicks and "Dutch drops" just an in game day will take me about 2 to 4 real life hours, and I have only unlocked about a fourth of the total trackage in the game as I bought the line to Sylva. And yes, even after 80 hours, I still haven't even built the bridge to Bryson City, which is supposed to be the central hub for the game, and generally is the first location people unlock.
The economy in the game is fairly interesting, however, the vast majority of your income will be coming from the Sawmill in Whittier. Most industries, you are going only be making $150-200 a day from delivering cars. The sawmill however, you will be making over $3000 a day delivering logs, on top of a good $600 for the box cars and flat cars going in and out. Even from me expanding from there and keeping it at tier 3, it still provides over half my income. The real problem is that it is perhaps the most mind numbing and boring industry to supply, as you will be sending the same log skeleton cars just up and down a branch line, which is fairly easy to semi-automate by setting some switches and letting a AI controlled loco on road mode to go to the end of the line. It is more so a chore and an eyesore than all the other industries. The logging camps for whatever reason don't need any supplies unlike the other industries, so it's just the same cars going up and down, and got old fast as it is missing the whole puzzle aspect I was talking about earlier. While I could just not renew the sawmill contract, it is just so profitable. Not renewing the contract would be like shooting myself in the foot, making my progression even harder and slower. Perhaps if there was something like dropping off a box car with supplies after so many cars from the logging camp would at least hopefully spice up the monotony of the log cars.
Another point of caution is that the game has quite a lot of placeholder assets and audio. While it should be somewhat expected for an Early Access title, the developers did not really intend on releasing this game as an Early Access game and only released it when they did largely to keep a promise to have the game out in the year of 2023. The placeholder sounds themselves are not bad, and it is really only an issue due to all the steam locomotives sharing the same sound files. The "chuffs" in particular are problematic when you are doubleheading locomotives. Since the exhaust sound files are identical, it causes a fairly severe phenomenon of "comb filtering." Comb filtering is a very ugly audio distortion due to destructive frequencies, and in the game it can cause a phenomenon that sounds like there is water in your ear. I expect this go away with the addition of additional sound effects, but if audio is a very major point to you, it may be better to wait for future updates. I'll update the review when it is fixed.
In the end however, this is still probably the best *Railroad* game on the market. If you want a train simulation with physics, Derail Valley is an excellent choice. Want to build track and be a tycoon watching trains automatically go back and forth? Then Transport Fever 2 is for you. But if you want something in between that, while emphasizing realistic railroad operations, then Railroader perfectly fills that niche that so many other train games have been missing.

(THIS IS AN EARLY ACCESS RELEASE – The core game is stable and playable but some cosmetic features are still rough/absent and are being worked on)
There's a saying in Model Railroading about the different scales that goes something like this: O scale (the largest of the 3 common scales) is for people who like Locomotives, HO scale is for people who like Trains and N scale is for people who like Railroads.
Railroader is a game for people who like Railroads.
You start out as a scrappy little shortline railroad with about 5 miles of track and 1.5 locomotives, a caboose, a passenger car, some logging flats, $2500 bucks and a dream. There's been a flood that washed out the bridges connecting you to the rest of the branch and the big Railroad that used to operate in the area has sold the rights off for a song. Your ultimate goal is to rebuild and restore the line to its full ~60 mile long glory – repairing bridges, buying locomotives, expanding yards and facilities and even modernizing with authentically modelled 1950s Centralized Train Control signals and diesel locomotives.
Railroader focuses on what train people call the "Operations" level, which means the logistics and management of freight car movement on the railroad. The game supports this aim very well, with a system of contracts and waybills that create realistic traffic for the player to deal with. Cars arrive at interchange yards tagged for their destinations and have to be delivered by the player. Once loaded or unloaded, the waybills flip and the cars are returned to the interchange, with the player getting paid at both ends.
The game really nails the realism of railroad operations. Its fun to deliver cars "with a purpose" and get paid for doing it. Other train games like Run8 have had waybill systems, but Railroader adds a company management aspect that expands on the concept. One thing I really liked was that most of the milestones you pay for to expand and upgrade the railroad also involve delivering cars of materials to the job site and then returning them to the interchange.
Playing singleplayer you find yourself thinking like a yardmaster or dispatcher pretty quickly. The "Orders" feature, which lets you hand road trains off to a computer engineer or have it assist you in yard ops, lets you manage more than one train at a time. By setting switches, dropping fusee flares and a few other tricks of the trade you can get 4 or 5 trains rolling on your tracks at the same time without too much effort.
"Ok, its 6AM lets get the passenger train rolling east out of Whitter and bring the log train down the Connely branch to the sawmill. I've got enough time to get #11 out of the house and start switching the sawmill loading track before it gets here. Then I'll build an outbound freight for Bryson Yard. By the time its rolling the passenger train should be on its way back from Bryson and they can meet at Ela." is the sort of thing going through my head regularly.
Stable and functioning multiplayer co-op over steam only enhances this gameplay loop. If you can get friends or gaming buddies in to play as engineers, conductors, yardmasters and dispatchers the amount you can get done on the railroad skyrockets.
I'd classify the locomotive simulation as "simplified". There is no firing simulation, steam locos simply consume water and coal and stop working if they run out. Wheelslip is supposedly simulated, though there is no sand and I've never seen wheels slip so it might be overtuned. There are different weather conditions, though the have to be set with console commands and have no physical effect on adhesion. Shoutout to /weather fog at night though, its spooky. Couplers cannot break. You can derail if you take a curve too fast or hit a car too hard, though the cars stay "attached" to the spline of the rails and come off a few feet at most. Derailed cars can easily be re-railed with a few button presses so you can get on with your life. Rolling stock can get damaged by derailing or being hit too hard, though the damage model is fairly simple. Damaged locomotives consume more water and coal and damaged cars will derail more easily in the future. You also get a payment penalty for delivering damaged interchange cars. You can repair damage at your engine facilities if you need to.
On the plus side the brake simulation feels pretty good. Gladhands and anglecocks are modelled, you can bottle and dump air to kick cars or stop them. There are animated, working handbrakes and all the brake pistons and shoes on locomotives and cars operate and animate which is kinda awesome. Train and independent brakes work like you'd expect, and small applications of the train brake are pretty effective. Personally I think the brake pipe recharges just a bit too quickly, but it could be tuned that way for gameplay reasons. Nobody wants to wait minutes for their brakes to recharge.
The level of simulation present makes running on the road a bit dull. I'd recommend trying to drive as close to track speed as possible, which adds a bit of excitement. Otherwise hand your road freights over to the AI and go do some switching or run local trains.
There are a number of cosmetic issues that may bother you if you're a serious train guy. Some of the whistle options sound pretty bad. Currently all the trains use the same chuffing sounds and the transition from simulated chuffs to the recorded ones at ~10mph is too abrupt. Externally, locos and rolling stock look great but internally they're a bit bare and missing certain features. Scenery on the map is sparse and unfinished, with placeholders and untextured buildings in some areas. Still, its early access and we can expect this stuff to improve in the coming months.
Do be sure to turn the draw distance, vegetation and tree density up if your GPU can handle it, it makes the game a lot prettier.
All in all, Railroader is one of the more exciting train game releases we've had in a while. The combination of realistic operations, economic management and multiplayer co-op is unique to the genre. The game is stable and playable, with all core gameplay loops present. While some cosmetic details are rough, we can reasonably expect improvement soon.
If you're a person who likes Railroads, its an absolute buy.

This legitimately is the train game I have been waiting for since I've been a kid.
Train Sim World's bite-sized driver experiences always felt too confining.
Run8 was very close to what I wanted, but had no steam and no sense of progression.
Derail Valley is a fantastic driving and progression experience, but I wanted to own the railroad and not just drive the job sheet.
Railroads Online needed me to build the track which I am not interested in for company ops.
Railroader offers an experience where the state of your railroad and your company is continuous, ingame day by ingame day. You can let AI trains roll down the track and dispatch them from your CTC board. You can jump into a loco and run a service. You can crew a loco as a conductor and give the AI engineer commands.
All of this can happen seamlessly, no reloading, no changing saves, no changing modes. You have complete freedom to do as you like, when you like. It still has a way to go in terms of utility and useability as a singleplayer user, and if you're looking for a detailed steam sim you won't find it here.
For me, concerned more with ops and moving trains? This is my perfect train game with great responsive devs.

I feel a need to write a detailed review here because I see a big problem: this is a completely new kind of game (and one that I, for instance, have been wishing for for a long time). I've seen Railroader called a "railroad operations simulator", which feels like a good description but since it's something new that doesn't actually explain anything.
The way I like to think about it is actually to consider it from the lens of the old MS Train Simulator, or the more recent Dovetail games -- in those games, you are given a job to, e.g., run this passenger service between these stations, or shunt these cars around in the yard, without any particular continuity between jobs. You essentially do tasks that a real railroad would do, but only for the sake of having done those jobs; nothing changes because you did those jobs (aside from some "experience" number going up, or whatever).
In Railroader, you would do the same tasks but you have an overarching continuity for why you're doing them:
- Why are you moving these 2 cars from the interchange to Whittier Depot? Because you need them to be delivered to Bryson, so you'll add them to your passenger train (which you're holding up until the cars arrive) and run a mixed freight/passenger train.
- Why do the cars need to go to Bryson? Because you set up a contract with some industry in Bryson and therefore the interchange spawned the cars for you (or, ingame reasoning, they were delivered for you from the neighboring railroad).
- Why did you set up the contract? Because it makes some money every time you deliver a car, and you want the money to buy fuel for your locomotives and repair parts for everything.
- Why run a passenger service? Because it doesn't need a contract and it makes some money (actually fairly decent money after a minimal investment). See above for what the money is for.
Reductively, what you're doing is running your small railroad for the purpose of running the railroad, and you can actually do nothing (declining all contracts) without consequence (other than eventually not being able to afford coal to run your starting steamers), but the reason to play would be precisely because the type of problems I've outlined above are interesting. All the freight movements come with some shunting puzzles at either end (some trickier than others, e.g., how do you get the 3rd wagon out of the dead-end industry track and on the other end of your locomotive?) as well as the need to operate the actual move itself, i.e., driving a train from Place A to Place B, and due to the fuel mechanic you want the moves to be as efficient as possible, which means using appropriately-sized locomotives and combining movements into as few trains as possible.
The existence of money is a further limitation: you have to pay for fuel and maintenance (and for the AI helpers, which especially in SP you really should be using a lot of!) so you want to take more contracts to make more money -- but that also gives you more work to do every game day. As you receive more cars at the interchange every time you add new contracts, you'll want more locomotives, which will consume more fuel/maintenance, etc., etc.. At the moment, the balance seems to be very favorable to the player (running costs are very small compared to income), so the major motivation remains solving the puzzles of getting all the cars to where they need to go, but at least it is possible to lose.
It's different, and it's not really a tycoon type of game (Railway Empire and Transport Fever are more focused on network layout than on operating said network) nor a simulator (Train Sim and its spawn are focused on completing individual tasks rather than operating the railroad itself) -- but it does have elements of both while providing a window into how actual railroads operate in real life (and why!).
Recommended specifically if you like what you've just read, but otherwise beware that it can become very tedious and repetitive in terms of actual gameplay: the track layout is fixed (although you do have to build up to the full layout by completing some one-time missions) and the contracts by definition always involve the same locations and the same types of jobs every time they come up.

best game for running trains very safely and not violating dozens of railroad regulations!
-get railroad going
-sign 6000 teir 5 freight contracts
-the interchange is a mess
-get the berkshire
-couple all the cars together
-"accidentally" fall off with the throttle open
-remember you left the switch open to a siding facing a neighborhood in bryson city
-get second engine
-wreck the second engine
-hear the berkshire approaching
-it derails on a curve just before the switch, phew!
-it crashed into the nitroglycerin plant
-the uranium processing plant is next to the nitroglycerin plant
-the whole thing explodes and irradiates everything within a 30 mile radius
get this game to operate trains in a sane and normal matter!

In short, it's excellent!

I came to this from Euro Truck Simulator 2, seeking a similar experience, but with a different mode of transportation. It was also my first foray into "train games" as a whole.

I wanted something like ETS2 in terms of progression, where I could go at my own pace, pick my jobs, and grow a company over time. It seemed like a lot of other popular train sims lean heavier into the "sim" aspect, which I don't mind, but that's just not what I was looking for.

This game blends those two things quite well in my opinion. The controls are just complicated enough to feel in-depth and interesting, but not so complicated that you need to watch a two hour YouTube guide to get the hang of. It helps that the in-game tutorial is very well designed!

As your save file progresses, new areas are unlocked and more difficult jobs become available. The rate of this progression feels good! I'm always worried about getting overwhelmed and confused early on in simulator-type games. Sometimes too much is thrown at you all at once, but this doesn't have that problem.

There are lots of locomotives and other things to play around with, and all of the ones I've tried so far feel varied in their strengths and weaknesses, which is good. It's never that fun or interesting when all the tools feel the same. As a diesel locomotive enthusiast, I am glad to say that the two that are available at the time of this review are very satisfying to use. Hoping for more options in the future!

The optimization is good as well, most of my PC hardware is pushing eight years old with a six year old GTX 1080, and this runs between 50 and 60 FPS comfortably on max settings. The sound design is minimal, but effective. The graphics are realistically styled, but not photo-realistic, which is fine.

All in all, this is a great project that I feel good about supporting. The logistics puzzle elements, cool train stuff, company management, and world progression aspects blend together very nicely. I would recommend this to anyone who thinks that blend sounds interesting!