Model railroads have been considered for decades either a kids’ hobby or one that should be relegated to the cobwebs of old men’s basements. In fact, Sid Meier is about to propagate the former belief with his next PC simulator, Sid Meier’s Railroads, because he was inspired to create it after visiting a model-railroad museum during one of his Civilization IV press junkets. But much like Meier did with the original Railroad Tycoon in 1990, he’s going to make railroads cool for a broader audience, if PC gamers can be considered “broad.”
Sid Meier’s Railroads is all about becoming a railroad baron, starting with a modest engine in the United States and gradually expanding to control entire lines across the world. The game begins simply enough by laying some track and creating your first multi-car train. As in any simulator, you’re charged maintenance fees for train upkeep, but in Railroads you make that money back by transporting goods from city to city.
This transportation is where the game will start to pick up for most people, because in spite of the ability to customize each of the 30 era- and location-specific engines with paint and decals, the “gussying up” will only be fun for so long. Each city in the world has specific needs, which you’ll discover once you’ve laid track to it. Baltimore, for example, may need grain, so you’ll build tracks there from Oklahoma City to transport that good. As time goes on, Baltimore’s needs may change, in which case you’ll need to find cities that sell that commodity inexpensively and transport that high-profit good back to Baltimore.
The economies in Sid Meier’s Railroads are based on real-world supply and demand, so progressing through the Economic Mode will require paying attention to each city’s needs, your profitability, your ability to strategically lay track and your railroad company’s bottom line. In fact, your in-game company will eventually go public, at which point you will have to maintain profitability to keep your stock price high (it will fluctuate depending upon your success or failure).
In probably the coolest development move, this concept of public companies is carried over to the game’s multiplayer mode as well. Had there not been a fully functional economic system in Sid Meier’s Railroads, there wouldn’t really be much to offer from a multiplayer standpoint. Yet with that model in place, multiplayer games are won or lost based on your company’s public performance, as the more-profitable of the two opponents will eventually be able to “buy out” the other player’s stock and win the game. Talk about being “owned.”
For the less hardcore economists, Sid Meier’s Railroads also has a Sandbox Mode in which you simply build trains and routes throughout the world. The world in Sid Meier’s Railroads isn’t scaled, so cruising over the entire acreage of America is little more than a one-minute affair. Same thing with Europe. Things get much more detailed once you zoom-in from that 10,000-foot view, much like zooming-in from the strategic to tactical maps on Sid Meier’s Pirates. Also in the same vein as Pirates, the world in Railroads is a bright, shiny, happy place. Even the engines, which vary from era to era and are reproductions of models that were actually available in each city/region during that time, are modeled realistically but presented in a way to keep them fun and engaging.
It’s been literally decades since we’ve owned a model train set, but the concept and memories are still fresh in our minds. Clearly Sid Meier’s in the same boat, because as much as toy trains are nostalgic, it’s going to take a little “something something” to get us interested in them again. With its full economic system and unique multiplayer component, though, Sid Meier’s Railroads might just have that “something something” to make playing with trains fun again.
— Jonas Allen
