Railway simulator
Trainz vs Mashinky vs Transport Fever
Trainz, Mashinky and Transport Fever all offer ways to build a railway world. Trainz centres on creating routes and driving trains; Mashinky and Transport Fever centre on managing the transport that runs through them.
Compare the three games
| Game at a glance | Trainz (TRS22 / Trainz Plus) ↗ | Mashinky ↗ | Transport Fever 2 ↗ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vehicles | Trains, and the driving of them — from the cab, with signals to obey, brake physics and AI trains working the same railway. Road vehicles and shipping are traffic and scenery rather than something you run. | Trains above all, with buses and trucks on the roads since the 2019 road-vehicle update. No ships and no aircraft. | Trains, trams, buses, trucks, ships and aircraft — over 200 vehicles in Transport Fever 2, plus a large Steam Workshop of mods. |
| Building | Surveyor, a free-form 3D route editor: track and roads as splines, terrain sculpted by hand or built from real elevation data, and tens of thousands of downloadable assets to dress it with. Several people can build one route at once in Multiplayer Surveyor. | A square grid, on purpose — an isometric build mode with board-game rules, where track pieces snap into the lattice. | Free-form: curves you place yourself, full terrain modification, and modular stations, harbours and airports assembled from pieces. |
| Towns and cities | Placed, not simulated. A town is scenery you assemble building by building; nothing grows on its own and nothing asks you for a service. | Simulated. Villages grow into cities as you serve them, and demand for cargo and passengers follows. | Simulated. Towns grow and re-zone into residential, commercial and industrial districts as your network makes them reachable. |
| Economy | None. Trainz is a simulator rather than a business: no balance, no cargo payments, nothing to go bankrupt with. Sessions and driver tasks are what it gives you instead. | Yes, and unlike anyone else: a token economy where each kind of cargo pays in its own currency, spent on vehicles and buildings across seven historical eras. | Yes — more than ten production chains with factories and goods, running costs per vehicle and line, a campaign across three continents and a free-play mode. |
| Price and platforms | Paid, and installed. Trainz Railroad Simulator 2022 lists at $39.99 on Steam for Windows and macOS; Trainz Plus is a subscription from $7.99 a month or $69.99 a year; Trainz Simulator 3 is a separate paid app on iOS and Android; and the World Tour spin-off reached Xbox in 2025 and Steam in July 2026. | A paid download ($24.99) on Steam, Windows only, and still in Early Access after launching there in October 2017. | A paid download on Steam, GOG and Epic for Windows, macOS and Linux, plus a Console Edition for PlayStation and Xbox released in March 2023. Transport Fever 3 follows on 29 September 2026 on PC, Mac, Linux, PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. No mobile or browser version. |
This guide is published by the creators of Rail Island. We are not affiliated with the other games featured here. Details are based on official websites and store pages; features, prices and availability may change. Spotted a mistake? Let us know at info@railisland.com.
Which game should you choose?
Choose Trainz to create detailed routes and drive trains from the cab. Choose Mashinky for grid-based railway strategy with a token economy. Choose Transport Fever for free-form 3D building and a passenger-and-freight business. The latter two are management alternatives, not substitutes for Trainz's driving simulation.
Surveyor and Driver
Trainz is deliberately two things. Surveyor is the world builder: you sculpt terrain, lay track and roads as splines, place stations, signals, trees, fences and buildings, and dress a route until it looks like a real place. Driver is where you get in and run it — a cab, a throttle, a brake and a signal ahead that means what it says.
Most players end up favouring one half heavily. That is fine, and the game is priced as one product for both. It is worth knowing which half you are buying it for, because they ask completely different things of you: Surveyor rewards patience and an eye, Driver rewards knowing how a train actually stops.
The route editor
Surveyor is the most capable route editor in this genre and has been for years. Track is a spline you can nudge vertex by vertex, terrain can be sculpted by hand or generated from real elevation data, and everything else in the world is an asset you place. Routes built in it run to hundreds of kilometres and years of work, and people share them.
Surveyor 2.0, included with the Trainz 22 Platinum Edition, modernised the whole thing: a marquee tool for selecting many objects, ground and textures at once; move and rotate gizmos; Scrapbook, an asset type that lets you copy a piece of one route and paint it into another; dockable palettes; and 3D thumbnails in the asset browser. Multiplayer Surveyor goes further and lets several people build the same route at the same time.
Driving, sessions and tasks
Driving is either a cab view with real controls or a simplified mode, and the railway around you works: signals, AI trains, timetables. A session is a scenario built on a route — a set of driver tasks, stock in place, a job to do — and sessions are how most routes are actually played. Trainz 22 ships six routes, with the Platinum Edition adding five more and twenty-one extra locomotives.
The Download Station
The reason people stay with Trainz for twenty years is the content. The Download Station carries tens of thousands of free community-made assets — locomotives, rolling stock, buildings, signals, whole routes — and there is an in-game Content Store for paid content beside it. If a particular real railway interests you, somebody has probably modelled a stretch of it.
Which Trainz to buy
The family is confusing, so briefly: Trainz Railroad Simulator 2022 is the desktop game, listing at $39.99 on Steam for Windows and macOS — there is no Linux build. The Platinum Edition is the same game with Surveyor 2.0, extra routes and extra locomotives. Trainz Plus is a subscription on top, $7.99 a month or $69.99 a year with a Gold tier at $14.99 a month or $129.99 a year, which adds the newest features and a large content catalogue.
The catch with the subscription is worth stating plainly: Trainz Plus content is rented. It is available while you subscribe. Buying TRS22 outright is the option that leaves you owning something.
Away from the desktop there are two spin-offs. Trainz Simulator 3 is a separate paid app for iOS and Android, $7.99 on the App Store. Trainz Simulator: World Tour — four routes and sixteen sessions across the USA, UK and Australia — came to Xbox in 2025 and to Steam for Windows and macOS on 14 July 2026, listing at $39.99.
What it needs
TRS22 asks for a 64-bit Windows machine, an Intel i5-class processor, 8 GB of RAM, DirectX 11 and around 40 GB of disk space, and a heavily detailed community route will ask for considerably more than the minimum. It is a big install by the standards of this list.
Who it is for
Trainz is for people who want the railway itself: the right signals, the right gradient, the right locomotive, and the view from the cab. It has no interest in whether your railway makes money, and that is the point. The price of entry is real — money, disk space and a learning curve in Surveyor — and what it buys is the most detailed railway you can build outside of a workshop.
Frequently asked questions
- Which Trainz should I buy?
- Trainz Railroad Simulator 2022 is the desktop game, listing at $39.99 on Steam for Windows and macOS; the Platinum Edition adds Surveyor 2.0, five extra routes and twenty-one locomotives. Trainz Plus is a subscription on top at $7.99 a month or $69.99 a year, with a Gold tier at $14.99 a month or $129.99 a year — but its content is rented rather than owned.
- Does Trainz have an economy or cargo payments?
- No. Trainz has no money of any kind — no balance, no revenue, no bankruptcy. It gives you sessions and driver tasks instead, so the goal is doing the job properly rather than turning a profit.
- Can I play Trainz on a phone or a console?
- Yes, but not the desktop game. Trainz Simulator 3 is a separate paid app for iOS and Android at $7.99, and Trainz Simulator: World Tour is a lighter spin-off that came to Xbox in 2025 and to Steam for Windows and macOS in July 2026.
- Can several people build one route together?
- Yes. Multiplayer Surveyor lets several people edit the same route at the same time, which is unusual — most route editors in this genre are single-player tools.
