Rail Route

why are the captions in the middle of the screen. omg

Fun and easy to play which allows a lot of freedom to create your own maps.

Interesting game, but it takes time to learn.

A bit more of a learning curve than I expected but never frustrating. I've enjoyed figuring out how everything works. Setting up the automation is fun. The more I automate, the more I can sit back, watch it all happen, and try to improve it.

The game just didn't click with me. The UI/UX needs some serious overhaul, those timetables are usability nightmare. Or maybe I am just to dumb to grasp the concept, I don't know.

Train dispatching. This is a great simulation of what the tower operators and train dispatchers do. The game runs smoothly, The advancement ladder makes sense, and it all just very immersive. There is a sandbox mode for those who don't want to play unrestricted. I've not tried the multiplayer mode as of yet. I'll see how that goes

A surprisingly steep learning curve on what is just the pure focus on train schedules and tracks. If you enjoyed setting up the railroads in (many) other games, this one is great.

I want to like this game, but it is too frustrating. Any addition to your networks breaks what was working in too many ways. Way too many clicks for a simple automated block signal. And trains flat out ignoring shunting commands. There just seems to be no focus on player quality of life.

As a tech lead drop out of a Russian railroad university I can appreciate it as a pretty good puzzle game and simulator, but it lacks in polishing, mod support, and some quality of life improvements, such as train timetable graphs from the real railroad dispatch

I played this game a bunch a few years ago, and eventually got to a point where I felt like I had already accomplished most of what I wanted to achieve with the game. Definitely was worth it though! Maybe some day I'll go back to it.

An incredible game, sure to please any rail fan, especially in all things strategy. I recommend it to everyone, but I had a problem while playing: after 5 hours straight, the game wouldn't save anymore, and even when I wanted to replace an old save with the new one, it deleted the one without saving the new one. I tried several saves to no avail, and because of this, I'm afraid to continue or restart a game and lose everything again.
I hope the developers see my comment and fix these bugs.

I've played for a handful of hours and ran into tons of bugs.
The worst is that now, on my big long game, I can't save anymore... autosave is broken, manual save is broken...
Can't even load the tutorial missions, because the game tries to save before doing so.
Guess i lost my game


Edit: Responsive developers. That is always a great sign. I'm changing my overall recommendation.

This is just awful, the game is not adapted at all for creating large railway lines. It is worth making a section longer than 200-300 in length and a bunch of stations in the editor, and the game when saving, zooming out or rewinding just starts to freeze hard or even crashes. I do not recommend the game, especially to creative people who would like to make their own large project in this game.

GREAT game to play and to think out of the box :)
nice job devs, I love it as a train lover.

"Oh Shoot! Is so burning my brain!"
"Is so annoying for me!"

Those things are always appear when I play Rail Route.
Because when you make a mistake, Chain effects will come to you.

Even I complained the game are hard and makes me angry, but I still recommend it!
Why? Let me tell the reason!

Rail Route is a Strategy Game. You have to use your own brain to think where the train to dispatch, how to makes better route, Patch the time schedule, etc.

Those muti-tasking make you have to get a attention the situation, Just like you are doing train dispatcher!

The Rail Route art style is my favor too! Morden design, Simplicity are makes my eyes are comfortable.
Not too vivid, but is fits on the game!

Anyway, I recommend this game!

Great game and plays very well on steam deck! Perfect for battery play! Typically only uses 7watts when capped at 30fps giving me 5-6hrs. :D

I want to love this game so much. I played many many hours of Train Dispatcher 15+ years ago, and was excited for this title.

But I just find it frustrating. I think the problem lies in the UI. Too many inconsistencies - right click vs. escape to exit menus, etc. A game like this that depends on speed of reconfiguring routes, it's too difficult to clearly lay out routes, quickly switch from building to routing, etc. Really needs a revamp. Going to uninstall, but monitor future development. I feel like it's close to being a good game - but a niche one - but just not doing it for me right now.

The game has a bit of a steep learning curve especially for the deeper level automation's, however I would absolutely recommend this game to any person interested in strategy or train based games. The visuals and animations are fantastic as well as high quality audio. This sim is very easy to sink hours into with great satisfaction.

Only one more and suddenly it's 6 am.

Very satisfying, choose your own adventure like puzzle automation game. Make it as hard as you want for yourself, with the more complicated you get, the more satisfying it becomes.

Sometimes crash or UI non-responsive when building large networks.
The game feels like coding with a bad language, with quite limited capabilities and sometimes not very sensible.
It's more like a puzzle than a sandbox.
Won't recommend at full price.

Confusing UI, I was just lost even after the tutorial as I couldn't overhaul the schedule to fix clashing train times. Great game just too confusing for me

So far I'm really liking the mechanics of this game, but I recommend it with a HUGE caveat - it is not an intuitive game. Despite having a well produced tutorial narrator, the game fails to teach you specifically how some of the most important mechanics work. I appreciate this from an experimentation and learning perspective, but in a game where you're trying to keep the trains running on time, I don't want to experiment! I want to dive right into optimization, and the game hides the keys you truly need to optimize and automate your routes.

Sure, you could probably find some youtube videos explaining things, but I also want to figure things out on my own, I just want a little more help/explanation from the game.

Kinda buggy, but still very fun!

If you like to manage things, and do mental gymnastics, this game is for you!

I got stuck a couple of times where the game failed to offer something new it was supposed to offer me (like regional contracts), but i sill find it very fun

🚆 Rail Route – The Addictive Art of Train Traffic Control 🚆

Rail Route turns the stress of managing a railway system into an oddly relaxing and deeply satisfying experience. It’s a mix of puzzle-solving, automation, and strategy, where you start small with a simple track and slowly expand into a sprawling, high-speed network of chaos (or efficiency, if you’re actually good at it).

🏗️ Gameplay: Build, Route, Repeat

The core loop is simple: schedule trains, manage tracks, and keep everything running on time. As you progress, you unlock automation tools, allowing you to optimize routes and streamline operations. What starts as a chill experience quickly becomes a test of your multitasking skills, especially when unexpected delays start to pile up.

⚙️ Difficulty: Easy to Learn, Hard to Master

The game starts off relaxing, but as your network expands, so do the challenges. Managing multiple lines, preventing collisions, and handling delays requires real strategy. The dynamic mode gives you full control over expansion, while the timetable mode challenges you to work within strict scheduling rules—both offer a different kind of brain workout.

🎨 Graphics & Sound: Minimalist but Effective

The clean, blueprint-style visuals are easy to read and fit the game’s vibe perfectly. The ambient soundtrack and soft train sounds add to the immersion, making it a surprisingly soothing experience—even when everything is falling apart.

⚖️ Final Verdict: 8.5/10 – Trains Have Never Been This Addictive

Rail Route is the perfect blend of strategy and relaxation. Whether you want to carefully plan the perfect rail system or just enjoy watching trains zip around, this game delivers. If you love transport sims or logic-based puzzles, it’s an easy recommendation. Just be warned—what starts as “one more track” quickly turns into hours of fine-tuning your perfect railway empire.

A must play for transportation fans! Great visuals and proper game design really makes you *feel* like a train operator

If you like trains and managing the routes, this is for you. If you like a puzzle game kinda thing, this is for you. Fits a nice area of both while still keeping it interesting.

Really neat game, with supprising depth and nuance. Starts as a simple coordinating puzzle game, and as you unlock automation tools shifts more towards planning and building complex transport network, or efficient scheduling and managing timetables.

For me it reminds me of rail network planning and building aspect of oldschool Transport Tycoon Deluxe with TTDPatch, or OpenTTD and scratches the same itch.

It's a bit rough around the edges though, at the start UI was a bit unintuitive for me and some details on the map are difficult to see. Also introduction of more complex automation pieces (that IMO make the game) is very simple and makes it difficult to understand them. You basically have to experiment a lot to understand different pieces, but when you do, the game gets really fun.

Overall, it's very unique and simple rail traffic management game, that distills the most fun for me aspect of much more complex transport sim games.

This game is fun, but not to easy or hard

Really engaging game; I thought I would not be able to fully grasp the various signaling system uses, but the tutorials are excellent, brief explanations of all the various systems and how they fit in together. I especially like the way the game teaches in steps the various means of routing, so that it is not overwhelming, but incremental which allows for absorption of the lesson.
As much as one may want to jump in to the big scenarios right away, I personally recommend against it because it is a steep hill to pull off. Frustration may lead to quitting, and this game is too much of a gem to play, so take the time to understand all the intricacies and you will find soon enough you can handle even the most difficult scenarios.

There are several YouTube videos of gameplay that also helped me to grasp what it takes to juggle the timetables and numbers involved with each map. I recommend watching a few if you ever find yourself 'stuck' or as in my case pissed off like a motherf#$%^& at my progress. 'Master Hellish' and 'Colonel Failure' have excellent videos to watch.

La papota hecha juego. Lo instale y no me movi por 6 horas de la compu y me sali nomas porque eran las 3 de la mañana.

Cocaine in game form. I installed it and didn’t move from my computer for 6 hours, and I only stopped because it was 3 AM.

Great automation game where you mainly solve problems that you created yourself. The game gradually gives you all the instruments to create more intricate networks, with progression depending on how high your total train throughput is.

The story mode can be goofy and distracting sometimes, and in order to properly educate yourself, you must dig deeper in the description of the different relays and signs on your own. Nevertheless, it feels and plays fresh, introducing something new to the genre.

I guess I'm not made for this genre, it looks cool, the game is polished and guides you better than many other automation games, but it feels like work.

I recommend it, if you enjoy rail specific automation games.

As a dispatcher myself, this is a fine game. I'll recommend my old teacher to take a look at it for his students.
I haven't played a whole lot of it but the controls are simple, the music is nice, the narrator made some references only a train dispatcher could get.
I'd say this is a fun game for the ones who are either just interested in this quite niche topic or even people who might wanna pursue the job.

This game is a solid maybe,

A lot of the positive reviews are accurate, it is easy to jump into, hard to really optimize the tracks, its really addictive and satisfying to get a good time schedule and have everything run smoothly after setting it up.

Now why it is negative:
- A lot of de-sync in multiplayer
-Some quality of life stuff that is annoying, for example if your rail has a sensor, sometimes it does not allow you to upgrade your rail to a faster rail, the only way is to delete the part and rebuild it with the faster rail. Or if you delete a rail, it might reset the sensors. Another thing is that if you upgrade the rail to a higher speed rail, it might also reset your sensors. This can get annoying if you have a large rail network and you are upgrading as it would take a lot of time to manually redo all the sensors.

excellent game - big learning curve and can get very complicated.

It's really fun, i can't stop playing.

Poor explanation in time tables, arrival/departure etc.

I really like the idea of this game. But it is too hard to understand how things work and this annoying guy does not help at all. And it is insanely bug riddled. I once rage quit it hitting alt+f4 and since that moment it crashes on start. WTF?

EDIT: I can not comment to the reply, therefore the edit. Thanks for your prompt reaction. A corrupted save file sounds plausible. However, I gave the game another chance and re-installed it. After the re-install the issue was gone and I could load the old save game. So it was probably something else. There was the latest update in between, so maybe this fixed it.

Another thing that is annoying: if you are in a menu, hitting ESC usually means "bring me back where I come from". This games does a lot of other things, like opening the pause menu etc. Depending where I'm at, it's very inconsistent. I'd expect it to always bring me one step backwards towards the game screen and only from there, hitting ESC should open the pause menu.

Unit Analytics gets re enabled every time I start the game despite I disable it. Really?.

Good game. Takes some time

Game is very fun, HOWEVER, once a train is "on" a routed section of track the entire length of the route is designated as occupied, and changes can't be made. This means you can't change a switch a mile down the route if the train has started on the section. If you accidentally sent a train without changing a switch, too bad. This is made worse with the fact that if you want a different train to be able to use those locked switches, you get penalized for a "run through". I had a great first impression until I saw this feature, but I will not be playing it again until either this is changed, or a workshop mod is released that changes it.

Once you get into it and understand how things work then it becomes a good game and a complex game,good for brain training and different maps equals different challenges a good buy and Recommended

As a railway maestro in Rail Route, I've found myself lost in the intricate dance of steel and steam. The game masterfully blends the simplicity of a city builder with the complexity of a logistics puzzle. Each city map is a new canvas, and I'm the artist, painting lines of track that pulse with the lifeblood of commerce and industry. The automation system is pure genius, allowing me to sit back and watch as my network operates like a well-oiled machine. Yet, the challenge is ever-present, keeping me on my toes as I optimize routes and manage resources. For those who love trains, strategy, and a touch of logic puzzles, Rail Route is the ultimate destination. It's a journey that's as rewarding as it is relaxing, and I can't help but whistle a steam-engine tune as I watch my empire expand across the landscape.

Love the game, and the MP (bata) thats comming will be amazing

Epic

good game

I enjoy the game... But it definitely has a steep learning curve, and the way skills are both described and implemented could be improved. I like it but it's definitely a little rough around the edges, and could be better.

Perfect time killer! Have been following progress since early access, almost from beginning. Its very deep, lot of variety, lot of maps. Its not easy first, but tutorials are good and you learn as you play. Devs has been very community friendly from beginning, changed and improved lot of things from players feedback etc.

And whats the best part: there is multiplayer now also! (although on writing this review multiplayer is still on unstable-branch).

i luv it, i luv it, i luv it, oh yes