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

Gentlemen tycoons! This time we saw to two things: your fleet, which had no way to grow, and the handbook, which — we confess — the railway never properly had.

• The handbook. Five books, nineteen sections: rules, the city, people, industry, the railway. Workshop norms, building prices, market rates, the cost of a line — all of it is read straight from the game's own mechanics rather than from separately written text. So it cannot lie: change the balance and the handbook changes with it. It opens from the start screen and from a button on the map, because questions arise mid-game, not before it

• Train upgrades. Wagons — up to five, each adding to your freight. And three branches of three grades: running gear for speed, body for capacity, endurance against wear. What you invest goes into the machine's price, so daily return, upkeep and resale value all rise with it — an upgraded train is honestly dearer to run

• The depot. A new building, one per city. Without it there is nowhere to upgrade, its level caps the grades, and repairs in a city with a depot cost a third less

• The mechanic. Fourth in the crew, hired only where a depot stands. Optional, but with him a machine lasts markedly longer: together with a specialist driver and the endurance branch, wear drops almost fourfold

• A train sitting in the depot no longer asks for money: upkeep is charged only to those on a route

• The leaderboard is now our own. Game Center is gone entirely — no sign-in, no borrowed interface. The shared list shows the name, kilometres of track, cities and people; you choose the name yourself, and no two tycoons may share one. The railway board may grant a tycoon a gift — it arrives straight in the treasury

• The power station has stopped being an ornament. Short on power and the surplus buildings go dark and stand idle, rather than merely denting the rating. Power now shows in the city panel, and every darkened building raises an alert

• The diamond mine was far too large: fifty places ate almost its whole output in wages. Now fifteen — the mine has become a reward for a city brought to perfection, not a second job

• No more than three leisure houses of a kind per city: beyond that it pays better to raise a level than to multiply small ones

The engines are under steam. Your move, tycoon.