Railroads Online Recreates the Golden Age of Steam
I’ve always had a slightly romantic view of train travel when it comes to means of travel, influenced heavily by the days when it was a leisurely pursuit. Thanks to the modern day rat race, opportunities to indulge in luxury train travel are few and far between, but imagine a time when this wasn’t just seen as cutting edge, but was actually crucial to the growth of society.
Welcome to Railroads Online, set in the golden age of steam trains. In a prosperous time for America, you take on the role of a pioneer who is aiming to become a railroad tycoon, and earn a good wedge in the process.
Laying the Tracks for Success
Your aim is pretty simple, build your company through freight once you have your rail network set up and operational. You’ll be transporting all sorts of essential goods including timber, ore and even cattle as well as building the infrastructure to support your logistical powerhouse. Alongside the necessities, there are also a number of ways to decorate your rail network and make it a little more interesting. Facilities and industry buildings are crucial to power your freight network, but different signs, decorations and structures referred to as “props”, are purely for cosmetic purposes.
As with any sim game, the options available to you can be a little overwhelming if you decide to dive straight in. Thankfully, Railroads Online has you covered with six tutorials designed to get you familiar with the basics. You won’t pick up everything here, but the in-game wiki is always at hand if you need to go back and look something up.
First up, you’ll need to get your train moving. To do so, filling it with fuel is a good start. Your train will have plenty on board to get you started, and more can be generated later on in the game from different facilities. Wood or coal will be needed depending on the locomotive in question, along with water to generate steam and sand to give extra grip in adverse conditions. Once your engine is fired up, the next stage is learning how to drive your train. You will need to control the reverser, regulator and brake in order to get going. The reverser controls the direction of travel, the regulator generates thrust and the brake, well hopefully you don’t need me to tell you that…
Taking the Controls: Driving and Building in Railroads Online
Driving can be done in two ways, either in first or third person. If you want to get as close to the real thing as possible, pulling all the levers one by one, then first person is for you. This is more challenging than in third person where the mechanisms are all mapped to different buttons that you can control more easily and simultaneously.
Driving the trains themselves is the most enjoyable bit of Railroads Online, especially tooting the whistle at every given opportunity. They are clearly faithfully recreated, each sounding and looking nothing but authentic.
Your next job is building the infrastructure for your trains, by laying track and clearing obstacles along the way. The track editor is a little fiddly, but very detailed. You have complete control over the gradient, curvature and length of the track, as well as access to switches, turntables, bridges and more to help direct your trains to where they need to go.
Of course, all this is useless to your endeavours without the ability to transport freight. These transport cars must be coupled to your train before being taken to pick up and drop off valuable materials. Once you get, er hem, rolling with this you’ll be well on your way in Railroads Online.
As I mentioned earlier, the main aim here is to shift freight around, and make cash. However, in doing so you will also earn XP and level up. This unlocks bigger and badder locomotives, and freight cars, which make it easier and more efficient when building your empire.
Derailed by Glitches?
Believe it or not Unreal Engine 5 has been used in Railroads Online and although things look pretty performance wise, it falls apart quite quickly. You’ll often experience a very juddery frame rate and things will completely disappear depending on the angle you’re looking at them from. The in-game physics can be altered depending on preferred realism when transporting freight, however when chopping trees down all sorts of weird stuff happens regardless. Amongst other things, they spun round before hitting the ground, floated in mid air and even completely vanished.
Also, depending on which build mode I was in, I could fly high into the air at great speed and zoom around in first person for some reason, whilst also still seeing the walking animation thanks to the torch I was holding. It’s fair to say that the physics are very much all over the place and borderline unstable at times.
Exploring the World: Maps, Multiplayer, and More
You can play Railroads Online across three maps: Lake Valley, Aurora Falls and (the largest), Pine Valley. Each is a pure sandbox and as a result lacks any structure, your enjoyment depends on how much you love trains and how far your own imagination can take you. You can get close to the action from a first person viewpoint, or select from a range of third person perspectives if you want to survey the vast landscapes. However, you’ll need to snap back to the first person to interact with everything again.
Railroads Online also has the option to play online surprisingly enough. You can join or host servers across the three locations, banding together to earn a small fortune. It works in exactly the same way as the single player mode, apart from the advantage of having more hands on deck, and hopefully creative minds in play.
For me Railroads Online has too little direction, this being an issue because I’m no train fanatic and I got bored pretty quickly. If there was some sort of campaign structure, I would have lasted longer because driving the trains around was pretty fun. However, whilst the three areas you can explore are all pretty vast, you start with very little. Railroads Online doesn’t offer different modes of play, so to improve accessibility for those like myself who aren’t train nerds, some pre-built networks to explore would have been interesting to play.
As the trains are from yesteryear, there’s no mod cons so if that era doesn’t interest you there’s little else on offer. Who knows, maybe in the future the action will time jump, however the use of the word “Railroad” suggests to me probably not.
A Train Sim for Enthusiasts, But Casual Players May Need More
This is the main factor to consider with Railroads Online, because for those who are interested, it’s a solid sim which isn’t actually that overwhelming and yet is deep enough to surely please even the most die hard train fanatics. The attention to detail will surely please these players, allowing them to realise their dreams as a turn of the century railroad tycoon.
Railroads Online is an unapologetically faithful train sim which, depending on your interest in the era, very much falls into the “marmite” category.
Tracking Links
Railroads Online: Build Your Steam Train Empire with Friends on PC and Console! – https://www.thexboxhub.com/railroads-online-build-your-steam-train-empire-with-friends-on-pc-and-console/
Locomote Your Dreams: Railroads Online Set for PC, Xbox and PlayStation – https://www.thexboxhub.com/locomote-your-dreams-railroads-online-set-for-pc-xbox-and-playstation/
Buy Railroads Online on Xbox – https://www.xbox.com/en-gb/games/store/Railroads-Online/9PM4L21LMCK8
There’s also an Extended Edition – https://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/store/railroads-online-extended-edition/9NTW50MGDX4C/0010
