Train Tycoon: Railroad Empire

Start with one station — and one day your rails may circle the globe.

Train Tycoon is an economic strategy game played on a real map of the world. 395 cities from New York to Melbourne are waiting for your railroad. Build stations, lay track across countries and continents, put trains on the lines — and see to it that every run brings the treasury a profit, not a loss.

THE WORKS Logging camps yield timber, mines yield iron. Workshops turn raw materials into beams and ingots; the factory turns those into sleepers and rails for new track. Raise your buildings' levels — every level raises the output.

THE HIRING OFFICE Fresh faces at the labor exchange every morning — each with a name, an age, a trade and a price. A master at his own bench works half again as hard. But your people need a home, a job and a bus between the two: neglect the city lines and the city grinds to a halt.

CITY HALL Power, police, medics, cinemas and restaurants — every city has its needs, and its rating climbs only when they're met. A city at one hundred percent opens a diamond mine.

THE LEDGER A market with drifting prices and daily limits. A bank with deposits and loans: miss a payment and the branch gets downgraded. Trains wear out, buses burn through their range, wages fall due every day. Profit isn't handed out here. It's earned.

THE ROAD DOESN'T WAIT — OR PUNISH A game day lasts 30 minutes. While you're away the road keeps working: come back and collect the takings. Dispatches will report a stalled bus or a finished line.

THE RECORD BOOK More than twenty multi-tier achievements — from your first kilometre of track to an empire on six continents. Your total score goes to the Game Center leaderboard.

No timers to sit through, no energy that runs out. Just you, a map of the world, and the railroad you're going to build.

Your train is waiting, tycoon.

What’s new

A CIRCULAR FROM THE RAILWAY BOARD

Tycoons! This one is repairs, end to end: we ran an audit of the whole railway — from the cash desk to the job board — and closed everything we found.

• The books for your absence are kept properly. Costs for all the missed days used to be taken at once, before the first ruble of takings — a sound railway could return to an empty treasury and a scattered staff. Now takings first, then the bills, day by day, just as when you are here

• The treasury never goes below zero — not when you decline a job, not when you pay off a loan. The gifted train No. 444 can no longer be sold for four million

• The mechanic leaves the crew with the man, rather than servicing the train from beyond the grave. Hiring counts three required places and adds a mechanic when it can, and a full crew in a city with a depot has an "Add a mechanic" button

• Honest building. The menu and the build itself finally agree on one price: the first building of a kind in a city needs no materials, each next one costs a tenth more, and the depot costs the advertised three hundred thousand. A demolished station can be built again — a city used to be left without one for good

• Electricians work on site: no bus carries them, and no "not getting to work" alert is raised over them

• The diamond mine: unpaid, it stands until you pay; fix the city's troubles and it starts at once

• The job board no longer freezes: untaken offers expire, and a "three-day" deadline lasts exactly three days. The bank grows to level five, as do its rates — the "Upgrade the bank" job is doable again. At the market a lot can be bought in parts, as long as you can afford a single unit

• Words now match deeds: leisure houses bring 7,200 per level, which is what it says; an empty cinema raises an alert; an unpowered building says "unpowered"; the workshop descriptions quote the real norms

• The clock. The notification shade and the app switcher no longer count your seconds twice, and turning the system clock forward no longer gifts a month of mining

• Small things: a leaderboard name with an underscore is no longer reported as taken; the tutorial can be restarted right from the map; the store opens over any window; a bus with a dry tank draws its lines gray

Steam is up. Your move, tycoon.