Railroader

Railroader is an operations-first railroad simulator set in the steam-to-diesel transition era of Appalachia, with rolling stock and motive power from the period that the genre most often skips. The world is modelled after the Southern Railway's Murphy Branch, with tree-covered ridges and river valleys bracketing the mainline, and most of the game is about doing the actual job of running a small railroad rather than racing locomotives across an empty map.

Your railroad is the lifeblood of the towns it serves. Boxcars of machine parts, bulkhead flats of pulpwood and passenger consists all arrive at the interchange yard and need to reach the right industries on the right schedule. Progress unlocks more powerful locomotives, prettier passenger cars, expanded mainline track and broader upgrades to the road itself, and the goals you chase are entirely up to you — you decide which contracts to take and at what intensity the railroad will run.

Most of the systems scale to your preferred play style. Solo players can lean on AI engineers to run manifest freight between yards while they switch cars by hand, or hand off the throttle entirely while focusing on dispatch. ABS and CTC signalling let you run the railroad efficiently from inside the locomotive, or step outside into the dispatcher's seat at a faithfully reconstructed US&S Centralized Traffic Control machine and route trains across the whole division. Multiplayer servers can host anything from a sleepy daily mixed train to a busy operating session with formal jobs and assigned crews, and customisation extends to tender lettering, paint colours and locomotive whistles.