Rail Island vs OpenTTD

Two hobbies wearing the same hat

Both games put you in charge of a transport network, and there the family resemblance ends. OpenTTD is an economic simulation: towns and industries produce cargo, cargo pays by the tonne and by the hour, and every line you build is an investment you are expected to justify. The fun is in the optimising — the perfect junction, the feeder network, the line that finally turns a profit.

Rail Island has no money in it at all. There is no balance to watch, nothing to pay for, and nothing to go bankrupt. What it has instead is the building itself: a free-angle rail tool that fits real curves, terrain that folds into cuttings and embankments under a new line, nine bridge types you preview in 3D, and tunnels through anything in the way. If the moment you enjoy is the one where a viaduct lands exactly where it should, that is the whole game.

A grid, or a drawn line

This is the difference you feel first. In OpenTTD, track is laid tile by tile: every segment follows the square grid in 45° steps, and a sweeping curve is an approximation made of short diagonals. That constraint is what gives OpenTTD its readable, almost diagrammatic look, and veterans build astonishing things inside it.

Rail Island draws instead of stamps. Click a start point, click the next, click a third, and rather than leaving a hard corner the game fits an arc into the bend and labels it with its radius while you build — you can set the radius you want from the toolbar first. Commit the chain and the ground moves: a corridor is flattened to rail height and graded outward, which is what turns a line across rolling country into a real cutting and a real embankment. Roads are allowed twice the gradient rail is, so a road can charge up a slope the railway has to sidestep.

What runs on it

OpenTTD gives you four modes — rail, road, water and air — and, through NewGRF add-ons, effectively any vehicle set anyone has ever drawn for it. Rail Island ships nearly 350 vehicles of its own: steam, diesel and electric locomotives, multiple units, coaches and freight cars, plus buses and trams on your streets, ferries and liners between your ports, aircraft in and out of three sizes of airport, and cable cars strung over the hills on pylons you place yourself. The catalogue leans Czech and European, and every model can be turned around in 3D before you commit to it.

If what you want is not in either catalogue, both games let you bring your own — OpenTTD through NewGRF, Rail Island through the Creator, where a .glb file becomes a building, a train, a bus, a ship, an aircraft or a cable-car cabin, and a woods type is a recipe you paint onto any island.

Towns

OpenTTD simulates its towns. They grow when you serve them, they demand things, and a well-run network visibly changes the map over a century of game time. Rail Island does not simulate towns — it lets you build them. The island generator seeds villages, towns and cities according to a dial you set before the map exists, the City tool drops a fully planned settlement with streets, plazas and a church on the square wherever you click, and the building catalogue puts 137 models in your hands one at a time. Where a road meets your railway you get a real level crossing, with lamps and buses that wait.

Money, and doing without it

OpenTTD pays you by quantity, by delivery speed and by how perishable the cargo was; you take out loans, you watch a company value, and you can be outcompeted by an AI or by fourteen other human companies. Rail Island has none of that machinery, on purpose. Nothing is priced, so nothing is ruled out for being unaffordable: you can build the cathedral-scale terminus first and work out what it connects to afterwards.

What Rail Island does keep from the operational side is the part that makes a network interesting to watch: trains are defined by a consist and a list of stops, signals cut a busy line into sectors so more than one train can work it, and the whole fleet runs on one board you can open at any time.

Where you can actually play them

OpenTTD is a desktop download: Windows, macOS and Linux, free from openttd.org, GPL-licensed, and playable without any original Transport Tycoon files thanks to its own OpenGFX graphics. Since March 2026 the Steam and GOG listings work differently — new players there get OpenTTD bundled with a paid copy of the original Transport Tycoon Deluxe, while existing owners keep what they had and the direct download from the project remains free of charge. There is no official mobile build and no browser build.

Rail Island is the opposite arrangement: it only runs in a browser. Open the page on a laptop or a phone, and you are building within seconds — add it to your home screen and it behaves like an app. Sign in and your islands are saved to the cloud, so the map you started on a desktop is on your phone on the way home. Publishing an island produces a link anybody can open, with no account needed to look at it.

What OpenTTD does better

• Depth. Thirty years of balancing, cargo chains, industry mechanics and route optimisation that Rail Island simply does not attempt.
• Multiplayer. Up to fifteen companies on one map, competing or cooperating. Rail Island is single-player; islands are shared by publishing them, not by playing them together.
• Mods. The NewGRF ecosystem is enormous and nothing in a browser game matches it.
• It is free software. GPL-2.0, no subscription, no account, and it will still run in twenty years because anyone can compile it.
• It runs offline, on hardware far older than anything a 3D browser game will tolerate.

So which one?

If you want to run a company, optimise a network and be graded on it, OpenTTD is the better game and has been for twenty years. If the appeal of that genre was always the drawing — the curve that fits the valley, the bridge across the inlet, the station tucked between the woods and the sea — then Rail Island gives you exactly that part, without the accounting, and without asking you to install anything.