Railfever 2.6

Railfever 2.6, a transport tycoon in the browser, runs entirely offline. Play it at https://iebb.github.io/railfever/.

Railways and stations

• One rail mode. Rail, metro and light rail lines are all rail lines: one numbering series, one palette and one filter, and any mix of main-line, subway, elevated and street-level stations can share a line. Metro and light rail remain construction styles (subway, elevated, street level, close station spacing).
• Walking catchments along real streets, twice the reach. Stations draw passengers from the buildings people can walk to along streets: about 420 m for rail, 385 m for tram stops and 280 m for bus stops. Full coverage extends to about 210 m and tapers beyond.
• More entrances for every station. Ground stations can get a side hall, a footbridge (stair towers and a covered deck across the tracks), an underpass or a platform-end gate on either side of the tracks. Subway and elevated stations can get more pavilions and stair towers. Each entrance adds walking catchment, and the station window shows the residents each one reaches. Rebuilds keep entrances connected to their streets.
• Even spacing. Vehicles hold briefly at timing points and leave depots one headway apart, so lines no longer bunch. Three buses on one line went from delivering 316 / 30 / 29 passengers to 151 / 132 / 122.
• Realistic economics. One rail fare model: distance-based with a minimum charged once per journey, plus the speed factor. Urban demand is denser in big town centres. Intercity rail pays again: a line between two 3,000-person towns reaches about 20% load and a profit by year 3. City light rail repays its capital in about 3–4 years and subways in about 8. Passengers who give up waiting lower a station's rating and its demand, as in OpenTTD.
• Towns grow with good service. Growth follows the share of passengers actually transported, call frequency and station ratings. Passengers who give up waiting are counted and lower station ratings. Town car traffic scales with population.

AI companies

• They keep their railways: a line closes only after five losing years, and they cut service in steps first (shorter trains, fewer trains, dropped patterns, a shuttle).
• They connect lines mid-route and run through trains across them, join lines that meet end to end, pair parallel single tracks into double track, and build road shortcuts where buses make long detours.
• They build city railways in big towns, cooperate on underground links between two companies' termini, and run metro or light rail under main-line stations.
• Railway planning takes weeks instead of most of a game year.
• Their network work is resumable, so saved games replay exactly.

Interface

• Onboarding:
  • affordable defaults (single track, a modest first station);
  • a budget step in the checklist and a second stage;
  • Borrow and Open finances on money errors;
  • Finances on the I key and speed on , and .
• Small screens and touch: layouts for 1024×768, 800×600 and phones; touch previews before building.
• Accessibility:
  • colour-blind-safe map colours and line palettes;
  • an interface size setting (90–130%);
  • keyboard focus that works.
• Fixes:
  • M no longer also collapses the minimap (H does);
  • pinch always zooms;
  • failed demolitions cost nothing;
  • stations or depots in use ask before demolition;
  • selling a new train refunds it in full.

Performance and reliability

• No more blinking on low-end or busy PCs. Automatic resolution no longer presents black frames, and its changes are rate-limited.
• Autosaves are cheap. On the largest maps the main thread now stalls for 17 ms per autosave (was 422 ms). Starting a new game or loading another keeps the current game as "Autosave (previous game)".
• Station catchments recompute incrementally instead of all at once.
• Fixed-step simulation with exact save/load replay.
• Saves carry a version marker; a save from an incompatible version says so.

Saves from 2.4 and earlier load in 2.6. Saves made in 2.6 use a new format that older versions can't read.