Railroader
You and your fellow railroaders are the lifeblood of your railroad, just like it is the lifeblood of the communities it serves. Switch cars at industries. Keep people moving while running local passenger trains. Run trains with a purpose in transition era Appalachia – in Railroader!
Railroader is a early access, simulation and trains game
developed and published by Giraffe Lab LLC.
Released on December 07th 2023 is available in English only on Windows.
It has received 2,398 reviews of which 2,340 were positive and 58 were negative resulting in an impressive rating of 9.3 out of 10. 😍
The game is currently priced at 28.99€ on Steam.
The Steam community has classified Railroader into these genres:
Media & Screenshots
Get an in-depth look at Railroader through various videos and screenshots.
Requirements
These are the minimum specifications needed to play the game. For the best experience, we recommend that you verify them.
Windows
- Requires a 64-bit processor and operating system
- OS: Windows 64-bit
- Processor: Intel Core i5
- Memory: 8 GB RAM
- Graphics: Nvidia GTX 1660 6GB
- Storage: 8 GB available space
Reviews
Explore reviews from Steam users sharing their experiences and what they love about the game.
I feel a need to write a detailed review here because I see a big problem: this is a completely new kind of game (and one that I, for instance, have been wishing for for a long time). I've seen Railroader called a "railroad operations simulator", which feels like a good description but since it's something new that doesn't actually explain anything. The way I like to think about it is actually to consider it from the lens of the old MS Train Simulator, or the more recent Dovetail games -- in those games, you are given a job to, e.g., run this passenger service between these stations, or shunt these cars around in the yard, without any particular continuity between jobs. You essentially do tasks that a real railroad would do, but only for the sake of having done those jobs; nothing changes because you did those jobs (aside from some "experience" number going up, or whatever). In Railroader, you would do the same tasks but you have an overarching continuity for why you're doing them: - Why are you moving these 2 cars from the interchange to Whittier Depot? Because you need them to be delivered to Bryson, so you'll add them to your passenger train (which you're holding up until the cars arrive) and run a mixed freight/passenger train. - Why do the cars need to go to Bryson? Because you set up a contract with some industry in Bryson and therefore the interchange spawned the cars for you (or, ingame reasoning, they were delivered for you from the neighboring railroad). - Why did you set up the contract? Because it makes some money every time you deliver a car, and you want the money to buy fuel for your locomotives and repair parts for everything. - Why run a passenger service? Because it doesn't need a contract and it makes some money (actually fairly decent money after a minimal investment). See above for what the money is for. Reductively, what you're doing is running your small railroad for the purpose of running the railroad, and you can actually do nothing (declining all contracts) without consequence (other than eventually not being able to afford coal to run your starting steamers), but the reason to play would be precisely because the type of problems I've outlined above are interesting. All the freight movements come with some shunting puzzles at either end (some trickier than others, e.g., how do you get the 3rd wagon out of the dead-end industry track and on the other end of your locomotive?) as well as the need to operate the actual move itself, i.e., driving a train from Place A to Place B, and due to the fuel mechanic you want the moves to be as efficient as possible, which means using appropriately-sized locomotives and combining movements into as few trains as possible. The existence of money is a further limitation: you have to pay for fuel and maintenance (and for the AI helpers, which especially in SP you really should be using a lot of!) so you want to take more contracts to make more money -- but that also gives you more work to do every game day. As you receive more cars at the interchange every time you add new contracts, you'll want more locomotives, which will consume more fuel/maintenance, etc., etc.. At the moment, the balance seems to be very favorable to the player (running costs are very small compared to income), so the major motivation remains solving the puzzles of getting all the cars to where they need to go, but at least it is possible to lose. It's different, and it's not really a tycoon type of game (Railway Empire and Transport Fever are more focused on network layout than on operating said network) nor a simulator (Train Sim and its spawn are focused on completing individual tasks rather than operating the railroad itself) -- but it does have elements of both while providing a window into how actual railroads operate in real life (and why!). Recommended specifically if you like what you've just read, but otherwise beware that it can become very tedious and repetitive in terms of actual gameplay: the track layout is fixed (although you do have to build up to the full layout by completing some one-time missions) and the contracts by definition always involve the same locations and the same types of jobs every time they come up.
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In short, it's excellent! I came to this from Euro Truck Simulator 2, seeking a similar experience, but with a different mode of transportation. It was also my first foray into "train games" as a whole. I wanted something like ETS2 in terms of progression, where I could go at my own pace, pick my jobs, and grow a company over time. It seemed like a lot of other popular train sims lean heavier into the "sim" aspect, which I don't mind, but that's just not what I was looking for. This game blends those two things quite well in my opinion. The controls are just complicated enough to feel in-depth and interesting, but not so complicated that you need to watch a two hour YouTube guide to get the hang of. It helps that the in-game tutorial is very well designed! As your save file progresses, new areas are unlocked and more difficult jobs become available. The rate of this progression feels good! I'm always worried about getting overwhelmed and confused early on in simulator-type games. Sometimes too much is thrown at you all at once, but this doesn't have that problem. There are lots of locomotives and other things to play around with, and all of the ones I've tried so far feel varied in their strengths and weaknesses, which is good. It's never that fun or interesting when all the tools feel the same. As a diesel locomotive enthusiast, I am glad to say that the two that are available at the time of this review are very satisfying to use. Hoping for more options in the future! The optimization is good as well, most of my PC hardware is pushing eight years old with a six year old GTX 1080, and this runs between 50 and 60 FPS comfortably on max settings. The sound design is minimal, but effective. The graphics are realistically styled, but not photo-realistic, which is fine. All in all, this is a great project that I feel good about supporting. The logistics puzzle elements, cool train stuff, company management, and world progression aspects blend together very nicely. I would recommend this to anyone who thinks that blend sounds interesting!
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Early Access... (updated review per late May 2024. I am now playing with NO crashes/game stops and the updates are good. Good job developers :-)) This railroad game is already GOLD. It ticks all my railroad fun boxes, and all in ONE game! The one box that is usually UN-ticked for me is the dispatching. But here you can have it all :-) You drive the steam trains + a couple of early diesels (or let the AI help you) You shunt (you are on your own with this :-) ) You dispatch. There are 3 driving modes: In “Manual”, YOU are in charge of controlling the train. In “Yard” and “Road” mode the AI drives the steam engine for you. You can easily switch between the 3 modes in a small window. ...and you can also play it in multiplayer. But I am solo player only. So can't really say anything about that. ...and you can put "watch", "observe" and "trainspotting" in there too. It is all one big lovely mix of (steam) railroading. Next day you do the same as above... But today is different from yesterday, because the mix of freight deliveries varies from day to day, depending on what contracts, and the LEVEL of said contracts, you have accepted. You dispatch from a CTC dispatching panel in the station building at "Bryson". In the beginning your railroad have not gotten access to the town of Bryson, so you have neither CTC nor any signals at the beginning of the game, and you must hand throw ALL the switches yourself. Once you have gotten access to the town of Bryson, it is possible to start building up the CTC. Every day just happens to be a different driving and shunting puzzle for you. YOU choose, how many industry contracts and therefore puzzle intensity you want. Your railroad starts out small, but you can choose to re-build bridges (that was lost in a big flood) to gain access to more railroad, more stations, more potential costumers... by buying and delivering the freightcars with the needed materials needed to rebuild that bridge. I suggest you start out SLOWLY accepting the industry contracts, and not just accept everything and max up the levels at once. Because at some point you will end up with TOO MUCH to do, in too little time, and on too few tracks. There are many steam engines, and cars/wagons (passenger and freight) of varying sizes and prizes, and they look great. Even a couple of (expensive) early diesels. The landscape looks good, LOTS of trees, or none. (You can scale the density of the trees quite a lot in the settings). Makes a BIG difference in looks, and perhaps PC performance, which I am not troubled by. I am running high settings with lots of trees and get a consistent 60fps. The basic core gameplay is already so much fun, that I don't quite notice that in some places, the game is still basic and EARLY ACCESS. Buildings are often lacking here and there, Railcars are empty. Passengers and cargo loads is there in numbers, but are invisible. Most fully loaded freight cars still looks dissapointingly empty. Coal cars, and perhaps others, do have a visible load that varies with the fill level. And I do experience 'crashes'. Game seems to, sometimes, but not often, and under conditions I don't know, let the mouse clicks/KB commands seap through to the desktop and stop the game from running. BUT. There are frequent auto-saves and I haven't had any big losses of game progression. A BIG recommendation from me.
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This legitimately is the train game I have been waiting for since I've been a kid. Train Sim World's bite-sized driver experiences always felt too confining. Run8 was very close to what I wanted, but had no steam and no sense of progression. Derail Valley is a fantastic driving and progression experience, but I wanted to own the railroad and not just drive the job sheet. Railroads Online needed me to build the track which I am not interested in for company ops. Railroader offers an experience where the state of your railroad and your company is continuous, ingame day by ingame day. You can let AI trains roll down the track and dispatch them from your CTC board. You can jump into a loco and run a service. You can crew a loco as a conductor and give the AI engineer commands. All of this can happen seamlessly, no reloading, no changing saves, no changing modes. You have complete freedom to do as you like, when you like. It still has a way to go in terms of utility and useability as a singleplayer user, and if you're looking for a detailed steam sim you won't find it here. For me, concerned more with ops and moving trains? This is my perfect train game with great responsive devs.
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as an avid railroad nut, both modern and ancient era of trains, i have been searching for the perfect game to hit all of my boxes. i have been looking through multiple platforms, including mobile games to find the one game that allows me to run trains in a 3rd person view, but also run as a shunting job and a running job as well, the one game that came close to it was derail valley, it had the concept of taking jobs, hooking up to them, moving around the yards to set up, then run the product to its destination. the only thing with derail valley was it is first person, which did not set up for me too well. then came along railroader, and OMG this game is fantastic!!! from the selection of steam locomotives, to the scenery and era at which you run through the beautiful mountain ranges and flowing rivers. this game hit all of my boxes, shunting and switching jobs, running passenger cars through the map while i move cargo around, buying cars to run my own cargo to make more money in the pocket to buy even bigger trains to run, an ever expanding map to keep improving on!!! if i ever talk to someone that is looking for a train game to play, i will 1000% recommend railroader to them. but now for complaints, they are not big but i know they can be improved on. #1 - the sound of the locos chuffing after you pass 10MPH, 0-10 is perfect, but once you hit 11, it switches to a different noise and again at higher speeds. i dont know how to program anything like that, but i know other games have been able to perfect the chuffing noises. #2 - i know you might have a lot of comments for this but the whistles, we need more, and more specific, i want the 3 chime they mount on the union pacific big boy #4014, you have on that is close to it in pitch, but its still not there. #3 - ai controls need to be more refined, i am posting this after the update that fixed running passenger cars! so my rating and review has changed!! other than the problems i have listed, the game is damn near perfect!!! i cant wait for future updates, hoping and crossing my fingers you guys add more steam locomotives to choose from!!!
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Last Updates
| Steam data | 17 November 2024 12:00 |
|---|---|
| SteamSpy data | 22 January 2025 04:50 |
| Steam price | 22 January 2025 20:51 |
| Steam reviews | 21 January 2025 11:49 |
Online players
658
Developer
Giraffe Lab LLC
Publisher
Giraffe Lab LLC
Release
07 Dec 2023
Platforms