Discover > Open Rails

What is Open Rails?

It is a train simulator and a hobby that offers free fun for life. Discover what you can do with Open Rails:

Play

Drive steam, diesel or electric powered trains in a simulation that approaches reality
Perform activities to transport passengers and freight safely and on time
Load and unload various types of freight and pick-up fuel
Operate signals, switches, turn tables, transfer tables and elevators for locomotives and wagons
Load and unload containers at an operational terminal
Couple and uncouple freight cars at yards and industrial sidings
Drive multiple trains in a timetable driven railroad simulation
Observe the train inside and out and make screenshots using the 7 camera views
Engage in Multiplayer sessions
Or just sit back in a passenger car and enjoy the scenery from all over the world

Socialize

Join an international community of like-minded people
Participate in forums like Elvas Tower, TrainSim.com and many other international forums
Get answers and learn from other railroad enthousiasts
Share your knowledge, stories, photos and screenshots

Create

Create your own railway routes, form the terrain with or without satellite and map data, lay tracks and roads and build the scenery
Build or repaint locomotives and rolling stock
Build new scenery objects
Assemble train consists out of locomotives, passenger and freight cars
Record and add railroad and environment sounds to enhance a realistic experience
Create challenging activities that measure performance in various railroad operations scenarios
Create timetables to simulate a railroad with multiple operational trains

Collect

Numerous free and payware, real-world or fantasy routes and other content
Various Locomotives and Rolling Stock
Activities for countless hours of play
New scenery objects like tracks, roads, houses, bridges and tunnels, cars, animals and people to use when building your own route

Learn

Control the power of a train and navigate challenging terrain
Install new content to expand your railway inventory
Build your own routes using the TSRE route editor and various other tools
Create activities that define train operations scenarios
Set up timetables to schedule railroad simulations with mutliple trains
Use of 2D and 3D grahics tools to create your own locomotives, rolling stock and scenery objects

Contribute

Share your creations: routes, rolling stock, scenery objecst, activities and timetables with the rest of the Open Rails world
Help with testing and report any issues with new Open Rails software releases
Join the worldwide team of volunteers that continuously improves the - open source - Open Rails Train Simulator and supporting tools

Open Rails and Microsoft Train Simulator

Our project provides a train simulator for the largest collection of digital content in the world - routes, rolling stock and activities - initially developed for Microsoft's Train Simulator product.

Microsoft Train Simulator, which was launched in 2001, was very successful but Microsoft had several false starts at developing it further and these came to an end in 2009. However, Microsoft Train Simulator was an open platform and a host of content both free and commercial has been developed for it.

Open Rails is a successor to Microsoft Train Simulator and runs the trains on routes built for Microsoft Train Simulator. However, there are some differences worth discussing.

Open Rails uses more recent technology so it can take advantage of modern graphics processors. This leads to higher frame rates, more colors and detail, larger displays and smoother motion.

Open Nature of Open Rails

Open Rails is open, as the name suggests. It is a project launched, developed, maintained and nurtured by a team of volunteers. Our team is working to provide a sound future for the communities' content and to create the best possible train simulator.

Our use of the GPL (or Free Software) license means that anyone can read the software, find out how it works and create a modified version. In practice, the project benefits dramatically from this openness with contributions both large and small and, of course, an overflowing wish list.

New, untested, versions of the product are freely and immediately available, so we have many users who quickly find any issues with a new version and maintain quality at a very high level. From its inception, Open Rails has proved much more robust and crash-proof than Microsoft Train Simulator managed.

While the simplest bugs are fixed at once, we maintain a bug tracker to record more complex bugs and monitor their progress through the stages New, Confirmed, Triaged, Assigned, Fixed.

An Exciting Future

Started late in 2009, the project is now reaching a most exciting stage as we achieve the goal of replacing Microsoft Train Simulator and move on with plans to do much better than Microsoft Train Simulator in both realism and facilities such as multi-user, timetables and editors for creating content.