Railway Empire vs Railroad Tycoon vs Mashinky

Which Railway Empire

There are two, both on sale. Railway Empire (2018) is the cheaper one at around $29.99, set in North America, with over forty locomotives, more than thirty wagon types and 300-odd technologies across five eras; the Complete Collection of 2020 bundles its nine expansions, which add Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain and Ireland, Mexico, the Andes, the Great Lakes, Northern Europe and Australia.

Railway Empire 2 (25 May 2023) is the one this page describes. It is the larger and easier of the two to start with: two continent-sized maps instead of one region, sixty locomotives, a track editor that places signals for you, and co-operative play. If you are choosing today, start with the second and treat the first as a cheap way to get more North America.

Track across a fixed landscape

You do not shape the ground in Railway Empire — the continent is given, and the game is about finding a route through it. Track is dragged freely rather than snapped to a grid, gradients and curves matter, and a tunnel through a ridge or a bridge over a river is priced against the detour that avoids it. Surveying a line between two cities is most of the decision-making.

Railway Empire 2 rebuilt that tool. Signals are placed automatically as you build, which removes the part of the first game most players got wrong; bridges and tunnels take up to four parallel tracks, so a busy main line can be widened rather than replaced; and a station can be extended to eight platforms as the traffic through it grows. Building a four-track approach into a terminus is a few drags, not an afternoon.

269 cities you connect, not place

The maps are the whole of the United States and continental Europe — over 13 million square kilometres between them, and sixteen maps in all once the seven regional cut-downs of each continent are counted. The cities on them are real ones at roughly their real places, 269 across the two, and each has its own demands and industries.

That is the opposite arrangement to a city builder. You never found a town or zone a district: a city grows because your trains bring it what it wants, and a well-served one turns into a market worth more than the line that reached it. Working out which of three cities to connect first, with the money for one, is the game in miniature.

Freight, bonds and the share market

Money comes from hauling: passengers and mail between cities, raw materials into the industries that want them, finished goods back out. Cities pay for what they are short of, so a route is profitable because of what sits at each end of it, and the map changes as those places grow.

Above that is a finance layer. You can issue bonds — three at most, and no more once their value passes a tenth of the company — and pay quarterly interest on them. The share market runs on four branches of the regional economy, and you can buy into your rivals: hold all of a competitor’s stock and its whole network becomes yours. It works in reverse, too, which is the one way to lose a game outright.

Sixty locomotives and a seat in the cab

Railway Empire 2 ships sixty historically modelled locomotives, each with a release year, a speed, a tractive effort, a reliability and a running cost, so choosing an engine for a gradient and a consist is a real decision. You can repaint and rename them, which is more fun than it sounds once a livery is yours.

And you can ride them. The game will put you in the cab or a carriage and let the network go past at track level — a feature that has nothing to do with the simulation and is one of the better reasons to keep a save open.

Campaign, scenarios and co-op

Railway Empire 2 has a five-chapter campaign spanning both continents, fourteen scenarios with their own objectives and rankings, a free-play mode you set the rules of, and a construction mode for building without the economy in the way. Expansions add regions and stock: Bella Italia, Journey to the East, India, High Voltage and Industrial Wonders, and Steel Dragons took the railway to China in October 2025.

Up to four players can share a single company in co-operative multiplayer, which is unusual in this genre — you are not competing companies but colleagues arguing about where the line should go. It is the one feature the Nintendo Switch edition does not have.

What it costs and where it runs

Railway Empire 2 lists at $49.99 on Steam and is a Windows game on the desktop — 64-bit Windows 10, 8 GB of RAM, a 4 GB graphics card and 40 GB of disk. There is no macOS or Linux build; the first Railway Empire does have a native Linux version, which is worth knowing if that is your machine.

On consoles it is on PlayStation 4 and 5, Xbox One and Series X|S — included with Xbox Game Pass on console and PC — and on Nintendo Switch since 22 June 2023. There is no mobile version and nothing that runs in a browser.

Who it is for

Railway Empire is for people who want a railway company to run across a real map, with the accounting present but not punishing. It is the most approachable of the classic tycoon games here, it looks like a game from this decade, and it is the only one on this list you can play co-operatively with three friends in the same company. If you want to sculpt the landscape or build something that is not a railway, it is the wrong game — the continent is fixed and the vehicles are trains.