← Rail Island

Release notes

What’s new in Rail Island

Rail Island gets better in small steps. Here is every release so far, newest first, and what changed in the game.

  1. Version 2.23.0

    Latest
    • Rails and roads can be decorated. Decorations is a new subtool under both Road and Railroad: pick a tree alley, an anti-sound wall, a fence or an alpine gallery, click where the stretch starts and where it ends, and the whole run is planted or built at once. Arrows show which way is Left and one button cycles which side gets it; on a desktop the stretch under the cursor is ghosted before you commit. A tree alley uses the woods picker, your own custom mixes included. A stretch started on one track of a parallel corridor can end on any other, and a gallery always spans the whole corridor -- solid on the side you choose, standing on columns on the other. Remove clears a stretch again.
    • The alpine gallery is built like the real thing: a stepped wall with a buttress at every module on the face the island is seen from, a colonnade of based and capitalled pillars under a head beam on the other side, and one cast-concrete slab that clears the line by fourteen studs and slopes so a slide runs off the valley edge.
    • Generated cities lay out their own roadside scenery: a gallery where a road runs high under a steep slope, an anti-sound wall on a wide street in front of houses, a fence along industry, and a tree alley wherever else there is room. They are ordinary decorations, so any of them can be changed or removed.
    • The loading screen has traffic on it. Three lanes -- the viaduct, the water and the sky -- send a train, a bus, a ship or an aircraft across the drawing, each at its own speed, and the screen always opens on a train answered by a ship or an aircraft coming the other way. The status is one word up in the masthead and the progress bar is gone. A tall screen grows a second bridge below the first with a lane of its own, and a phone held sideways gets a longer viaduct across the full width.

  2. Version 2.22.0

    • Bus stops come in three kinds. Pick one before you place the stop: the glass shelter with its bench and timetable, a roomier covered stop with timber seating and a departure display, or a covered loading platform with crates and safety markings, ready for the trucks and freight still to come. An existing stop can be rebuilt as another kind from its board, keeping its name, its place on the road and every route running through it. A stop on a hill now follows the road's slope, with its posts upright and its benches and bins level.
    • Five new bridge types: a steel plate girder, a timber trestle on splayed wooden bents, a concrete box-girder viaduct, a deck truss that hangs its lattice below the road and leaves the skyline open, and a network arch with crossed diagonal hangers. They build on railways and roads alike and carry overhead line and tram wire like the rest. All five are PLUS types, and as with the other premium types you can still turn them around in the picker on the free tier.
    • Bridges are better built. Piers taper to proper caps and bearing plates, wing walls close off the approaches, and stone and brick keep their own colour instead of washing out to grey. A bridge across the island keeps its piers, arches and towers now, where it used to thin down to a deck ribbon hanging in mid-air over the water.
    • Five new kinds of woodland grow on generated islands: Scots pine on dry inland ground, larch groves up in the hills and their autumn-gold variant, a hazel fringe along the edge of lowland clearings, and orchards planted around village houses. All five are in the woods editor as well, with the new trees to paint your own mixes with.
    • Every tree has been reshaped. Conifers get uneven whorls and irregular skirts, broadleaves overlapping lobes, palms a curved trunk and scalloped fronds, and the tiny far-away version is a closed silhouette instead of a floating cone. It all fits in the budget the old trees used, so a forest costs no more to draw than it did.
    • A T or a crossroads is one connected surface now. The asphalt and the pavement meet edge to edge around a proper kerb, the centre lines stop at the mouth of the junction, and it holds up on a slope: no more stacked road decks, walls standing in the middle of the road, or a pavement poking out through the next road's asphalt. Where a junction is hemmed in -- a very short arm, or ground the paving would be buried in -- it tightens up instead of cutting into the hillside.
    • Tram rails get through a junction built from short pieces. A turn's rails used to stop dead in the middle of the crossing when one arm was a sliver left behind by a corner fillet or a road split; the junction now looks along the whole road that continues each arm. Rails, wires and the trams themselves also sit on sloping junction paving instead of sinking under it.
    • Airports have proper buildings. A grass field gets an open hangar with sliding doors and a flying club with a red roof and porch; a regional airport a glazed terminal under a projecting canopy, with roof lights, solar panels and a control tower with a gallery; an international one folded roof bays, a departure concourse, a taller tower and passenger bridges reaching out to the stands. Every field has a windsock that turns and flutters, and the paved ones a radar going round. An airport keeps its shape from across the island, and its runway lights still flash while a strip is reserved.
    • Stations and ports hold their shape at a distance too. A far-off station keeps its platforms, roofs, station house and concourse towers, and a port its decks, piles, cranes, container stacks and terminal, where both used to drop back to a bare slab. The grand terminus now carries its clock facade at both ends, so which way round you place it no longer matters.
    • Generated cities have some character. Every settlement takes a character of its own -- historic, industrial, garden or commercial for a town or city, rural or red roofs for a village -- which shifts what gets built there and how tightly; related blocks gather into quarters instead of scattering across the map; and a square is sized to the landmark that stands on it, while the grandest landmarks keep their full open plaza. Streets along a coast follow the shoreline round its bays, and a coastal square is never graded, paved and then left empty.
    • A settlement no longer goes missing on a crowded island. Every city's ground was chosen before the first one was built, so a town whose spot a neighbour had since grown across simply never appeared -- an island set to grow many cities quietly giving you fewer. It moves to the next-best ground and gets built there.
    • Rails look like rails close up: a steel running surface over warmer, oxidised sides, and sleepers that vary one from the next instead of repeating identically down the whole track.
    • The wind turbine's blades turn on the hub again, instead of swinging around a point in the air above the mast.
    • The loading screen has a new drawing: a surveyed landscape of contour lines, woods, water and a station, with the express still running across its viaduct.

  3. Version 2.21.1

    • Ships keep out of each other's way properly now. A ship plans its passage around where every other hull will be and when -- it will wait at the quay for a moment, take a wider line, or hold station clear of the harbour mouth until a berth comes free -- and then sails the passage it planned at its proper speed, instead of crawling along behind whatever is in front of it. Two ships whose courses never really cross no longer hold each other up, and a port with every berth taken can now let a ship leave so the berth it was blocking frees.
    • A ship no longer refuses a river it fits through twice over. The width of a planned passage was measured by taking a reading every couple of studs, which stepped straight over a corner the line clipped by half a stud; the ship then re-checked the finished route, found that corner and turned the voyage down -- and because it planned the identical route on every retry, it went on refusing for ever while wandering off the port. The width is now measured along the whole line, so a passage the game plans is one it will sail.
    • A new loading screen: an express crossing a viaduct past a signal, drawn in the page itself so it is there the instant you open an island instead of waiting on anything to download. The install prompt no longer sits on top of it.
    • The menus, windows and toolbar have a new look -- a deeper teal palette, rounder panels with a soft edge and shadow, and rounded tool tiles in place of the round buttons, with the tool you have selected much easier to pick out. Every screen in the main menu now carries its own icon beside the heading, and the models and storage points you have left have moved up into the Open header, where they stay in view while you scroll through your islands.
    • The toolbar sits better on a phone. Buttons keep clear of a rounded screen's corners and the home bar, a long list of options scrolls instead of running off the top of the screen, and the button animations stop if you have asked your device to reduce motion.
    • The game reads better to a screen reader. Toolbar buttons, dropdowns, the map size and landscape cards and the menu tabs now say whether they are pressed, open, or the screen you are on.

  4. Version 2.21.0

    • Ports have a proper quayside. The timber jetty gets a rubbing strake, mooring posts, a fisherman's hut and stacked crates; the concrete quay gets bollards and fenders, painted deck lines, crane rails, a container yard, floodlight masts and a ship-to-shore crane standing on every molo; and the terminal adds a glazed hall with a flag mast, with a covered walkway, railings and lamps down each pier. River ports get the same quayside as the ones on the coast.
    • Everything at a port now stands where it belongs. The old gantry crane straddled the whole harbour with its legs in the water beside the molos and its beam hanging over the sea; every piece of equipment now sits on a deck or ashore, the piles under a jetty reach the water even when the port is cut into a bluff, and the ground behind a port is graded so the hillside can no longer climb over the quay or bury the back of the hall.
    • A bridge pier no longer shuts a river a ship fits through easily. The game had been counting a pier as far wider underwater than it really is, so two truss crossings could close a channel 48 studs across to a ferry that needs eight. And when a pier really is in the way, the game now says so, instead of advising you to buy a smaller ship where moving the bridge is what the river needs.
    • Joining an existing road or railway with a spur works next to a building again. A T-join onto a way that runs under a station platform, or through the block a large landmark occupies, was refused as building through an existing structure -- with no warning until you pressed Confirm, because the preview stayed green the whole time.
    • The Multiple Rails tool keeps up on a big island. On a network of several hundred segments, picking the side to build on had been taking seconds and every hover stuttered; both are now instant, and lay exactly the same corridor as before.

  5. Version 2.20.1

    • Detail no longer drains away on a machine that is running the island perfectly well. The game had been mismeasuring its own speed as it opened a map, and taking the graphics card's own timings at face value when the frames plainly contradicted them, so on a large island the picture could flatten to its lowest detail within seconds and stay there for the rest of the session at a steady 60 frames a second. The opening measurement now draws the island the way the game really draws it, a reading that the frames say cannot be right is no longer trusted, and a session that has been running comfortably for a while wins some detail back instead of being stuck at the bottom for good.

  6. Version 2.20.0

    • Knocking a stop down no longer breaks the lines that called there. A demolished station, bus stop, port or airport keeps its place in every line and in every vehicle's list of stops, shown dimmed and marked demolished, and the vehicles pass it by quietly instead of warning about it every lap.
    • Rebuilding one hands its routes straight back. Place a stop of the same kind -- anywhere on the island now, not just where the old one stood -- and the game asks which demolished stop this is, or lets you say it is a new one. Take one over and every line and vehicle that called at the old stop calls here instead. You are only asked while some route is still waiting for a stop that is gone.
    • Railways no longer grade a bald scar across the landscape. The strip of ground a way flattens is measured from the way's own width, so a railway bed levels only the ground it needs while a wide road keeps its full verge.
    • Tunnel mouths are finished properly. The coping above a portal and the pillars at its sides carry the same stonework as its face, instead of turning flat grey seen from above or from the flank, and a mouth that a bridge carries into the hillside high over a valley no longer leaves a see-through hole in the ground beside it.
    • The three-dots menu on the startup screen opens on screen on a tablet. On a display around 768 pixels wide -- an iPad mini held upright -- it had been drawn off the left edge.

  7. Version 2.19.0

    • Work that cannot reach the server is no longer lost. When a save fails -- because the island was saved on another device, or because the server could not be reached -- the game says so and keeps your unsaved changes in a backup on this device, and you choose whether to stay in the game or leave anyway. While saving is broken the top bar reads Not saved - backup only and the automatic backup keeps snapshotting the island locally, and the backup holding that work is marked Unsaved changes in the Backups list so you can restore it later.
    • Cable cars look right again. The cabins riding the rope had folded into crumpled slabs, and they are drawn properly once more -- and the big wheel at each station head turns with the rope instead of standing still.
    • Articulated buses and trams stay in one piece. Their sections had drifted apart at the joint with the accordion between them squashed flat, and both are back where they belong. The same fault had quietly stopped the island's buildings being drawn together, so islands run smoother again as well.

  8. Version 2.18.0

    • A pinned station, building or airport can copy a level and a heading off whatever is already on the island. Press Pick altitude or Pick rotation and the next map click is spent on it: the placement takes that object's own build level, or its heading -- click a road or a railway and it takes the exact angle the line runs at. The armed button wears the tool's colour until the click lands, and everything after that click moves the placement as before.
    • Admins can follow two more walks. A Funnels group in the analytics console holds Signup -- the sign-in wall, the provider chosen, the session, the first island -- and Transport funnel -- an island created, its first stop, its first vehicle, its first departure -- alongside the Subscription funnel that moved over from Money. Each splits by sign-in method or by transport mode, and says so when a window holds more walks than one answer can carry.

  9. Version 2.17.3

    • The create tab fits a phone screen. Its cards drop their boxes for bands split by a thin line, and the width that gives back goes to the island sizes -- all five stand side by side in one row again, each with its dimensions and its storage cost on a single line.

  10. Version 2.17.2

    • Making an island takes less scrolling. The create tab now opens on a single card holding the island's name, its size and the Create island button, with the five landscape measures -- hills, variability, rivers, woods and cities -- folded into a second card below it that shows what each one is set to. Press one measure to change just that one, or press Adjust to open the whole list at once.

  11. Version 2.17.1

    • Admins choose how a card is drawn. Every card in the analytics console now carries its shape in its own header -- a day-by-day summary as a line or as bars, a breakdown as bars or as a pie -- with the table always one press away, and the choice is remembered for that card the next time the report is opened. Bars stand side by side everywhere rather than stacked on each other.
    • The Upgrade report counts money from the subscriptions themselves. Its day-by-day card draws four lines -- upgrade window shown, checkout opened, paid, and subscriptions ended -- and the funnel ends on a subscription that actually started, so both cards in the group mean the same thing by paid.

  12. Version 2.17.0

    • Islands are no longer all made of the same ground. A new Variability picker sits under Hills on the create tab, from Uniform through Gently varied, Varied and Mixed country to Wild contrasts. At the wilder settings one end of an island can be a quiet plain while the other folds into ridges, and the rivers, lakes and shoreline follow whatever ground they are on rather than a single slope for the whole island.
    • Every picker on the create tab opens on its middle card, so a new island starts from the middle of each choice instead of its first option -- Hills on Hills rather than Flat, and the size picker on Medium.
    • Islands appear far sooner. An island now stands up on simple stand-in shapes and fills in the detailed buildings behind you, nearest first, and there is much less to download in the first place: every shipped model was re-encoded (the historic town centre that used to take a minute is a fifth of the size it was), an island fetches all of its stand-ins in one request, and the interface draws its icons from a single file it loads once.
    • A model you upload to the Creator is prepared in your browser before it is sent -- its stand-in shape baked and the model itself compressed -- so the upload is smaller and the model is ready to place as soon as it lands.
    • Admins read the analytics console by group. Administration opens on analytics, the drawer lists five groups rather than eleven reports, and the reports in the group you are in sit as tabs under the title. The nine-line overview is gone, replaced by four day-by-day summaries of its own -- People, Islands, Upgrade and Play time.
    • Admins can slice by more than one value. The audience filter is a single Filter button over a panel of checkboxes, with a box to type in when a list is long: several values in one filter mean any of them, and different filters all have to hold at once.

  13. Version 2.16.1

    • Five stars on an island now earn three months of Rail Island PLUS, free, instead of a year. The offer lives in the share window, next to the link you send to the players who can give you those stars, and it counts the stars that island has so far; the upgrade window is simply where PLUS is bought.

  14. Version 2.16.0

    • Ride along with any vehicle. A camera column down the edge of the screen puts you in the driver's seat, at a passenger window, beside the track, overhead, ahead of the vehicle or behind it, while Follow keeps it framed as it runs -- on trains, buses, trams, ships, aircraft and cable cars alike. Every vehicle board and every row in a fleet list also carries Find, which simply centres the view on that vehicle without handing the camera over to it. Drag to look around and scroll to zoom in whichever camera you are in. On a free account the view you open in is yours plus two more cameras of your choosing; Cinematic, which tours the whole roster on its own, is part of PLUS.
    • Tell us what is wrong without leaving the game. Send feedback sits in the menu on the start screen, in the game and in the Creator: say whether it is a bug, an idea or something else, write what happened, and choose whether to send the technical details -- laid out for you to read before you send them -- and a picture of the island you are on.
    • The Creator reads like a place with rooms. The bar across the top names the screen you are on instead of repeating the product name, a drawer lists where you can go, and a model or a woods type opens on a page of its own with a back arrow rather than in an overlay. An empty Mine list now says what Mine is for and links into the Creator, with a Reload button that picks up what you have just uploaded without reloading the island.
    • Towns are built up instead of dotted about. Shops and houses on a terraced block stand shoulder to shoulder with barely a gap between them, the ground around them is paved rather than left as meadow or dirt, and a building whose plot cannot be levelled now stands on a masonry foundation instead of leaving a hole in the street. Two new families of buildings -- old town houses and a plainer modern set -- break up the single art style every town used to be built from.
    • A hydrofoil ferry joins the ship fleet.
    • PLUS islands hold 50 storage points instead of 30.
    • Mountains carry on being mountains. The high rocky ground was painted in a blue-grey slate that read as a different kind of place pasted onto the peak, and it is the same stone as the rest of the mountain now. The grass-to-bare-soil border is scattered rather than cut at a threshold, so a dry stretch no longer goes bare in one flat patch, and concrete, pavement and terrace walls have a straight edge again instead of dissolving into the meadow.
    • Fixes to how a town sits on its ground: each square is levelled to its own hillside rather than the main square's, so a second centre is no longer a crater of steps; the road joining that centre to its parent no longer drives straight across the square it belongs to; and a block's paving stops at its greenery instead of running on down to the waterline.
    • Small islands have their rivers back. River count had started following the island's area, which left a small island nearly dry and cut an x-large one into pieces that were awkward to connect; it follows the island's extent again.
    • Aircraft keep their detail in the air. An airliner cruising several hundred studs up was judged by the tile it was passing over, so it dropped to a couple of boxes while a train twice as far away still drew every window -- and the simple shapes it falls back to at a distance are now the shape of an aircraft rather than a plank as tall as the fin.
    • The list of your islands loads again for accounts holding more than a handful of them.

  15. Version 2.15.1

    • Admins get an Audience report. The analytics console now charts who is playing -- devices, languages, countries and how long people have been at it -- and one slice above the whole section narrows every report, and the raw event grid with them, by island size, active day, language, country or device.
    • Admins can see what is behind a row. Selecting a row in any report lists the accounts and islands that make it up, with a link straight to their events, and the overview gained three lines it never had: registrations, checkouts opened and real play minutes.

  16. Version 2.15.0

    • Woods types are made in the Creator. The configurator that mixes species, heights and density has moved out of the game and onto its own page beside the models, where a woods type is something you keep rather than something one island holds: give it a name and a foliage colour and it stays in your library. Publish one and anyone can find it under Community, and duplicate anyone else's to start from their mix. In the game the woods board is now simply a picker -- Common, Mine and Community -- and whatever you choose paints straight onto the island.
    • Painting with any woods type is free. The free edition no longer stops at the woods the game ships with: every type, yours or the community's, paints on both plans. What PLUS buys now is keeping a woods type private -- on the free plan every one you make is public.

  17. Version 2.14.2

    • The Creator has one menu. About, the language picker, What's new, the build number and Upload all moved into the menu behind the hamburger, so there is one place to look for anything that is not the model list -- and Common / Mine / Community stays where a reader already is, as the row of chips above the list. The list takes the full width of the page, and on a phone the menu covers the screen instead of pushing the list down it.
    • The Creator no longer scrolls sideways. The page was sizing itself to the widest row of the model table rather than to the window, which slid the whole layout left and carried the account button off the right edge. It fits the window now, and the bar across the top stays put while the list scrolls under it.

  18. Version 2.14.1

    • Rail Island now measures its own use. What gets built, which tools and screens are opened, how long a session runs and how the PLUS pages are walked through are recorded on Rail Island's own servers rather than an outside service, so an ad blocker no longer decides what is counted. It records the shape of what you do and never the islands themselves -- no island, station or train names, and nothing you have built. While you are signed in the measurements are tied to your account, and all of them are dropped after about three months.

  19. Version 2.14.0

    • Upload your own models. The model database is now the Creator, on its own page: it lists every model the game ships and, once you are signed in, takes GLB files of your own -- buildings, trains, buses, trams, ships, aircraft and cable car cabins. It works out which way a model faces and how big it is from the file itself, a rail or road vehicle is sized to the width of the fleet it runs beside, and anything you upload turns up in the matching picker in the game.
    • There is a library of models other players have shared. Every vehicle picker and the Creator itself carry a Common / Mine / Community switch, and the community half is searched and paged rather than piled into the grid. What you upload is public; PLUS can keep a model private, so nobody else is offered it. You can rename a model or correct its numbers without uploading the file again, and an island that used a model you later delete shows a stand-in shape in its place.
    • Cable cars are built with one tool. Cable car is a Buildings subtool now: click where each station goes and nothing is written to the island until you confirm -- the ground the sheds will stand on is levelled and the trees on it felled while you are still deciding, and stepping back or leaving the tool puts all of it back. The two stations turn to face the line by themselves, pylons are added afterwards from the cable car's own board, and marking a station for demolition marks the whole line, since that is what the button takes away.
    • Hills and bays are the same size on every island. Terrain features were measured as a fraction of the map, so a bigger island got the same number of hills, only wider and gentler -- an x-large island reached the same peaks at half a small island's slope. A hill, a bay and a headland now keep their size in studs and a bigger island simply holds more of them, and the number of rivers follows the island's area.
    • Detail climbs back once an island is fast again. After the quality ladder had dropped to the floor on a heavy map, deleting whatever was slowing it down left the detail at 0% indefinitely, at nearly 60 frames a second. It now recovers as soon as the frames are comfortable.
    • The frame cost on the FPS readout says what it means. It reads in whole milliseconds, with a mark in front of it for what the detail ladder makes of it: room to spare, over budget, or in the gap between the two thresholds where the detail cannot move either way. The detail panel it opens spells the same measurement out -- the verdict in words, what measured the frame, and both thresholds it is compared against.

  20. Version 2.13.0

    • The main menu is tidied up. The Browse buildings, Browse vehicles and Browse woods boards are gone -- the model database already shows more about every shipped model than they did -- and the start screen carries a direct link to it beside the title, next to an Upgrade button on a free account or a PLUS chip on a subscribed one. The in-game woods row is named for what it actually opens, Manage woods types; What's new has moved into the start screen's menu, and the build version now sits in the footer of both menus.
    • The start screen fits a phone. On a landscape phone the plan control takes its own line instead of crowding the title, the six tabs shrink to fit rather than overflowing and scrolling the whole page, and on a narrow screen the Simulations tab shortens to Sims instead of being clipped mid-word.
    • The Gallery tab opens quickly. A published island now carries a small picture sized for the card it appears on, instead of the full-resolution shot, so the grid loads a fraction of the bytes it used to. Islands published before this keep showing their picture.
    • Ships are drawn again. No ship appeared on any island, at any detail level: the hull was being torn out and reloaded every single frame and never made it into the scene in time to be seen.
    • A ship standing at a bend no longer refuses the voyage. It used to report no route to a port at the far end of the road it was sitting on, and then hold station there with the rest of the fleet queued astern of it. It now eases its way into the corridor instead of demanding a clear straight run at it.
    • Play time and active days are counted by one clock, and it stops when you do. Time is banked only while the window is visible, focused and actually being used, so a laptop that slept with a map open no longer credits the whole sleep, and the two figures can no longer drift apart.
    • Rail no longer dives under the road at a level crossing. A crossing too short to hold both its flat part and an approach used to run the track down from the junction -- on one island four studs below the road deck -- while the preview showed it level. The flat now carries on into the next piece of track instead.
    • A train no longer takes a platform it cannot leave. When the platform it was routed to is occupied it now considers only the alternatives it could continue from, and waits at the signal rather than being diverted onto a dead end and failing a leg later.
    • The controls on the vehicle boards work while the fleet is running. The tab strip, the rows in the vehicle list and the picker's category pills were being rebuilt several times a second, so a click on one often landed on nothing at all. A vehicle row also opens its board when clicked anywhere along it, not only on the name.
    • The woods board says why Create is switched off. On a free account the button was dimmed with nothing on the board explaining it; the note and an Upgrade button are now there whenever custom woods are out of reach.

  21. Version 2.12.0

    • A vehicle that cannot reach its next stop now tries the rest of its stop list before falling back. Trains, buses, trams, ships and aircraft look down the list for a stop they can actually get to, serve that one and carry on, and a notice names the stop that was skipped and the one being served instead. Only when nothing on the list is reachable does the old behaviour take over -- the nearest station, the wandering bus, the ship holding station.
    • An airport too small for the aircraft standing at it no longer ends the flight. The aircraft skips that airport and flies on to the next one on its list that can take the airframe, instead of stopping dead at its stand and waiting for you to fix the list by hand.
    • Big islands stay smooth as you pull the camera back. Buildings, track, roads, trackside props, trees and vehicles now drop to simpler shapes according to how much of the screen they actually cover, distant rail and road are drawn merged rather than piece by piece, the ground carries the woods once the trees are too small to make out, and past a far zoom the whole island settles into simple shapes -- with every bit of the detail coming back as you move in.
    • The frame-rate readout opens a Detail level panel. It shows where the renderer has settled on a 0-100 scale and what that position is affording -- how far the forest reaches, which shadows are still cast, the resolution the island is drawn at -- and lets you step the level up or down and hold it there, or hand it back to Auto to follow the frame rate again.
    • Fixes to that new detail work: a train no longer stayed a plain box long after the station beside it had sharpened, wheel-zooming no longer flattened the whole island mid-browse, and merging distant chunks no longer dropped track or turned building shapes inside out.
    • Manage subscription no longer gives up on a single hiccup from the payment provider. The call that opens the billing portal now retries the way every other billing call already did.

  22. Version 2.11.0

    • Rail Island PLUS is on sale for real. Checkout on the live site now runs against the real payment account instead of the test one, so a subscription started there is a real subscription.
    • The upgrade window opens from inside the game, not only from the start screen. Every wall that turns something down for being free carries an Upgrade button straight into it -- the bridge, station and woods pickers, the line limit and the vehicle pickers -- and the picker you came from stays open behind it, so whatever you just unlocked is there to click the moment the purchase goes through.
    • A full model-type pool no longer reads as an empty one. The vehicle pickers dim and badge exactly the models there is no room for, leave every model you already run pickable -- putting another of those into service costs nothing -- and show the count above the grid.
    • The share window offers the free year of PLUS at the moment it becomes worth something: what five stars from other players earns you, how many that island has so far, and the reminder that friends have to be signed in when they open the link for their star to count.
    • Manage subscription is back in the account menu for anyone who won the free year and then subscribed on top of it. It had been hidden for as long as the free year ran, leaving a player who was being charged every month with no way to change their card or cancel.

  23. Version 2.10.0

    • Rail Island PLUS is now something you can simply buy. The upgrade window has a monthly subscription beside the five-star offer, and paying for it lifts every limit of the free edition -- storage points, bridge types, station types, model types, lines per island and the custom-woods configurator -- for as long as the subscription runs.
    • A window of its own follows the payment: it waits while the purchase is confirmed, then thanks you and lists what you now have. PLUS arrives while you watch it, with no page to reload, and if it takes longer than the window does, it says so instead of pretending the payment failed.
    • The account menu carries the subscription: the day it renews, and a Manage subscription button that opens the billing portal, where the payment method can be changed or the subscription cancelled.
    • A payment link from Paddle -- the mail after a renewal that did not go through, an invoice, a request to update your card -- now reopens that payment inside the game instead of dropping you on an ordinary start screen.
    • The free year for five stars is what it was always meant to be, a first taste of PLUS: it is offered, and granted, only to an account that has never had a subscription.
    • The sign-in screen links the terms of service, the privacy notice and the refund policy.

  24. Version 2.9.0

    • Every island now has a score, counted from what you have built on it: the trains, buses, trams, ships, aircraft and cable cars you run, the stations, station tracks, bridges, tunnels, signals and track you laid, the roads, bus stops, road signs, ports, airports, cable-car stations and watchtowers around them, the cities and buildings you placed, how many different vehicle models and kinds of transport you keep in service, and how long you have played. The round slot at the top left holds the number, and it is where your island stands against all the others -- 73 means it beats 73% of them.
    • Click that number and the score board opens: every measure, grouped, with what your island has beside what an average island has and how far it is from the best one, and the points each row earns. It replaces the list of map achievements, which is gone.
    • Cities, buildings and roads only count when you built them. Every island is born with settlements, and the streets and houses that come with them are not yours -- so a town you found with the city tool and the roads you lay yourself are what move those rows. A city founded before this release cannot be told apart from a generated one, so it counts zero until you found another.
    • Publishing an island is now sharing it. One Share button in the top bar replaces the three entries the map menu used to carry: it photographs your island, puts it in the gallery and opens a window with the picture, the link, buttons for Facebook, Reddit and X, and Copy link. Stop sharing lives in the same window, and an island needs a score of at least 200 before it can be shared.
    • A link to a shared island now previews properly wherever you paste it: the island's name, its picture and the stars it has, instead of the bare Rail Island card.
    • Closing Watch or Drive brings back the vehicle board it was opened from again. It had been silently staying closed, leaving you to reopen the board by hand.

  25. Version 2.8.0

    • Every line now has a colour of its own, and looks the same wherever it turns up: the route symbol, the colour and the name, beside the vehicle running it, at the top of a board and in the Lines list. Click it and that line's board opens. The pencil on the board's header sets both of the things a line is yours to choose -- what it is called and what colour it is drawn in.
    • A vehicle on a line has a Timetable tab in place of its old stop list. It shows that vehicle's own last lap -- when it reached each stop, how long it stood there and how long each stretch between two stops took -- with the stop it is heading for marked. Before, the same names were listed twice: once read-only, once with the line's numbers under them.
    • A line's own timetable now reports the middle of the vehicles running it instead of pooling all their laps together, so one vehicle held up behind a signal no longer drags every row out with it.
    • Stops join a line by clicking them on the map, the way stops are added everywhere else in the game -- a station, a bus stop, a port or an airport, whichever kind the line runs. The list of names to pick from is gone.
    • Taking a vehicle off a line asks first, because it hands the vehicle back its own copy of the route to keep running.
    • Only one board is open at a time now. Opening a ship, a cable car station or a line could leave another board open underneath it -- out of sight, still catching clicks, and reachable only by closing the one on top.

  26. Version 2.7.0

    • Vehicles that run the same route can now share a line. The line owns the stop list, so you edit it once and every vehicle on it follows the change, while everything personal to a vehicle -- its name, its consist, where it is, whether it is running -- stays its own. Trains, buses, trams, ships and aircraft can all be put on a line, and a line runs one kind of them. Three lines on the free plan, as many as you like with Rail Island PLUS.
    • The Vehicles window has two tabs now, Vehicles and Lines, and every line has a board of its own: the vehicles running it, the stops they share, and a timetable. Rename or delete the line from its header -- deleting one leaves its vehicles running the stops they had -- and grow it with the Copy button beside Start, which adds another vehicle with the same consist, already on the line.
    • Vehicles on a line space themselves out. Each one measures what a lap of the line actually costs it, and is then held at the first stop until it is an even gap behind the vehicle ahead, so four buses on a line settle into running roughly a quarter of a lap apart instead of bunching up nose to tail. A vehicle waiting out that hold says so and counts the seconds down.
    • A line's timetable is measured from the vehicles that are running it rather than planned in advance: for each stop, when a vehicle gets there, how long it stands, and how long it then waits before it can pull out; for each stretch between two stops, how long the journey takes and how much of that went on being held up along the way. The numbers keep moving while you watch them.
    • Every vehicle board now carries the line it runs -- on the Stops tab of a train, bus or tram, the Ports tab of a ship, the Airports tab of an aircraft. Open the line from there, leave it, or set one, and a line made from a board starts out with that vehicle's own stops, so joining never throws a route away.
    • Simulations record and replay lines, so a recording keeps the lines its vehicles were running. There is a new Bus Lines simulation to watch one work.

  27. Version 2.6.0

    • A new model database at /db lists every 3D model the game uses -- all the vehicles and every building -- with its size, how much of it there is to draw and where it came from. Sort or search the table on any column, and open any model in a 3D preview you can turn around. No account needed.
    • Islands draw a great deal faster, especially large ones and especially on phones. The ground behind the camera is no longer drawn at all, shadows are reused from one frame to the next while nothing in them moves, buildings far enough away stop casting a shadow before near ones do, and the signals and the cable cars cost a fraction of what they used to.
    • The Auto detail setting now moves in small steps instead of jumping between five fixed levels, so the island settles at the detail your device can really hold rather than swinging past it. And trees close to the camera are never drawn in their simplest shape any more, whatever the detail level -- that shape is meant to be seen from a distance.
    • On a device that is still struggling with the detail turned all the way down, the game now lowers the rendering resolution as a last resort -- and puts it back first, before any detail, as soon as the device catches up.
    • With Show FPS on, the detail readout now carries an arrow while the level is moving: up while detail is coming back, down while it is still being given up, and nothing once the island has settled.
    • Flicking the island to spin it now coasts to a stop in the same amount of time however fast your device is drawing. On a slow one it used to drift on for several seconds after you let go.

  28. Version 2.5.0

    • Ships give way to each other again, and properly this time. The water now has a network of sea lanes of its own, worked out from the ports your fleet actually sails between, and every ship keeps to it -- two ships bound the same way run the same line instead of each picking its own, wide channels are used one side each way, and no ship sails through another any more.
    • Where a channel is too narrow for two hulls to pass, one ship goes through at a time and the next waits at the last wide spot before it. A harbour entrance works the same way: one ship moves in or out at a time, however many molos the port has, and a ship trying to leave goes before one trying to arrive, so a full port never seizes up.
    • A ship reaching a port whose molos are all taken now waits outside the piers and goes in the moment one comes free, instead of crowding up the approach. A molo it could not swing into without sweeping a ship already lying there does not count as free, so a small harbour is never given more ships than it can turn.
    • A stopped ship now tells you what it is waiting for -- the channel ahead, the ship in front of it, a free molo, or the fairway at a port to clear.
    • Islands published from a phone or a tablet get a far better gallery picture. The shot is now taken at a higher level of detail than the device was playing at, so the gallery card, the strip on the website and the link preview show the island with its full scenery and shadows instead of the simplified version a phone draws to keep the frame rate up.

  29. Version 2.4.1

    • Building on a large island is far faster. Placing a rail or road point used to lock the game up for a second or two while the ground was reworked, and finishing the piece for a couple more; both now happen straight away. The difference is biggest on phones and on islands with a lot of track already down.
    • Trains on busy islands run smoothly again instead of lurching from one position to the next. The simulation was rebuilding its collision check from scratch several times a second on every island without a rail-on-rail crossing -- which is most of them.

  30. Version 2.4.0

    • Settings has a new Detail control -- Auto, Low, Medium, High or Ultra -- in place of the old vegetation detail option. Auto is the default and replaces whatever vegetation level you had picked before: it measures how fast your device is really drawing the island and moves the detail up or down on its own.
    • The forest is drawn a completely different way. Trees near the camera keep their full shape while distant ones step down to simpler models, and whole stretches of woodland out of view are skipped entirely. Islands run far smoother, especially on phones, and the trees now reach much further into the distance.
    • Fixed the island going white while a preview was open: the rail and road pickers, the entity preview and the tree-species pictures could take the graphics away from the game itself.
    • The game now recovers on its own when the graphics card stops responding -- it reloads the island instead of leaving a blank screen -- and says plainly when the browser cannot start 3D graphics at all, instead of reporting it as an island that would not load.
    • With Show FPS on, the readout now also shows how much detail the game is currently drawing, so a smooth frame rate at full detail can be told apart from a smooth one at reduced detail.

  31. Version 2.3.1

    • Fixed the FPS readout being hidden behind the toolbar on phones and narrower windows, where the button bar could grow tall enough to paint over it.
    • The Settings screen is smaller and simpler: vegetation detail and other options are now plain dropdowns on a compact card instead of a full-screen list of choices with explanations.
    • Vegetation now defaults to its lightest, fastest setting for smoother performance, especially on phones; if you already picked a different level, your choice is unchanged.

  32. Version 2.3.0

    • Added aircraft: build airports and run a fleet of aircraft between them -- light biplanes, regional turboprops, jets and the A380 -- with realistic taxiing, take-off, holding patterns, banked turns and landing.
    • Airports come in three sizes -- small, medium and big -- each with its own runway, taxiways, stands and terminal building, so the field you build always suits the aircraft using it.
    • Watch and Drive camera modes now work for aircraft, just like trains and buses, and the aircraft board and Vehicles list show live speed and altitude.
    • The Analyse tool now draws an aircraft's whole planned route ahead of it, not just the leg it is currently flying.
    • Added a Settings screen, reached from the three-dot menu, with a new tree detail option: the original trees, a higher-detail rebuild with fuller, more natural crowns, or the same trees swaying gently in the wind.
    • Fixed the ocean liner and cruise ferry sailing with visible daylight under their hulls instead of sitting properly in the water.

  33. Version 2.2.0

    • The FPS readout now shows a rolling one-minute average next to the current frame rate, marked with a small clock icon, so you can tell a single rough second apart from a stretch of play that has been rough throughout.
    • With Debug controls on and Show FPS turned off, a brief warning now appears whenever a second's slowest frame drops noticeably, so you still get a heads-up without leaving the full readout on screen.
    • Reduced stuttering the first time buildings, trains, buses, ships and cable cars come into view after opening a map.
    • General performance improvements to keep frame rates steadier on busy islands.

  34. Version 2.1.0

    • Added a Show FPS option to the Debug menu: a frame-rate readout in the corner of the screen, with its border turning orange or red when frames are being dropped.
    • Improved performance across the board -- 3D models are drawn in far fewer pieces, cable car cabins render more efficiently, and terrain rendering runs faster, all making busy islands noticeably smoother.
    • Fixed the game slowing down during long play sessions with Debug controls turned on.
    • Fixed river and lake wharves sometimes refusing to build, filling in the water they were meant to serve, or leaving ships with no way to reach their berth.
    • Fixed ships built at a wharf on a curving riverbank sometimes being unable to depart at all.
    • Fixed a wind turbine's blades disappearing instead of spinning.
    • Fixed a construction tool staying stuck to the cursor after instantly finishing a simulation.

  35. Version 2.0.1

    • Published island gallery pictures are now captured in full HD instead of a smaller size.
    • The sharper picture shows up everywhere an island's picture appears -- your own gallery card, high resolution screens, the Rail Island website's island strip, and link previews when you share an island.
    • Islands published before this update keep their existing, smaller picture until you publish again.

  36. Version 2.0.0

    • Added river ports: a single wharf built along the riverbank where ships lie alongside instead of bow-in between piers, sized for one or two liners.
    • Added a new river-and-lake island to the Simulations gallery, with a wide waterway big enough for the largest ships in the fleet.
    • Ships no longer automatically give way to each other in a busy port or strait -- multiple ships may now pass close by, or through one another, while a more capable traffic system is rebuilt.
    • Ships now plan a whole voyage as one smooth run from berth to berth instead of jerky stages, no longer cut corners into bridge piers or harbour moles, and a single bad berth no longer blocks an entire port.
    • Station, stop and port name labels now only show from a top-down view, fade out after the camera sits idle for 15 seconds, hide while you are riding a vehicle, and carry an icon -- train, tram, bus, ship or cable car -- showing what serves that stop.
    • The simulation console now docks along the bottom of the screen on phones instead of squeezing the view sideways, can be tucked away with a Hide button, and gained a Time multiplier (1x/2x/5x/10x) to speed up playback.
    • Fixed the see-through view used by the semaphore, tunnel and sign tools looking oddly lit and flickering under the moving sun; it is now a clean, flat, evenly lit view while you aim.
    • Fixed a "Game saved" message appearing when leaving a backup, a published island, or someone else's map you were only viewing, even though nothing was actually saved.

  37. Version 1.2.0

    • Added ships: build ports along the coast and sail ferries, a cruise ship and an ocean liner between them, complete with berths, moles, and lifelike departures and turns.
    • Ports now offer a berth to more than one ship at a time, and ships navigating a busy port or strait give way to each other properly instead of colliding.
    • Added cable cars: string an aerial rope line between two stations, pick a cabin, and run it as a simple shuttle, a two-cabin jig-back, or a continuously circulating line with three or more cabins.
    • Cable car stations come in gantry, chalet, modern and drive-house styles, with pylons that carry the rope clear of the hills and valleys in between.
    • Buildings with a mostly open structure, such as the Eiffel Tower and a wind turbine, no longer block the ground beneath them -- track and roads can now run underneath.
    • Cities and villages now spread their landmark buildings out across an island instead of repeating the same church or monument several times.
    • Ships now cast a shadow like every other vehicle on the island.

  38. Version 1.1.0

    • Added watchtowers: place a hot-air balloon viewpoint on any building's roof for a fixed first-person view of your island, and open up to four of them at once as tiles from the watchtower list.
    • You can now publish your island from inside a train or bus cab, or from a watchtower view, and the gallery picture is taken from exactly what you were looking at.
    • A published island now reopens on the same view it was published from -- a cab, a watchtower, or the ordinary overhead view -- instead of always dropping you into the overhead view.
    • The sun now moves slowly across the sky over a two-hour day instead of standing still, so shadows creep and every building gets its turn being lit.
    • Added a real sky overhead: a deep blue dome fading to a paler horizon, with distance haze that makes the far shore soften into the sky instead of staying just as sharp as the near shore.
    • Added drifting clouds, visible in the sky from train cabs and watchtower views.
    • Fixed rail continued from the end of a bridge sometimes being rejected as blocked by the bridge's own clearance, even where the ground underneath was already flat.

  39. Version 1.0.0

    • Reworked how buses and trams handle being blocked: instead of giving way to the side, a stuck vehicle now reverses in place and tries a new route -- to its current target if it can still reach it, otherwise to the nearest stop.
    • Added one-way road signs, placeable on narrow streets and single tram track: mark a street as one-way and vehicles will refuse to drive against it. Running two buses or trams through a narrow corridor now works best as a one-way loop of signed streets.
    • Junctions now let several vehicles through at once when their paths do not actually cross, instead of making every vehicle wait its turn -- for example, opposing traffic on a wide road can now cross a junction together.
    • Placed one-way signs now show up on the map with a coloured ring and direction arrows, just like semaphores, so you can see at a glance where they are and which way they point.
    • The City tool has been folded into the Buildings tool: pick Buildings to start placing houses right away, and use the Choose building button to open the full building picker, including whole towns.
    • Fixed a pair of vehicles that kept meeting each other from bouncing back and forth in an endless reverse-and-retry loop, and cut repeated 'vehicle stuck' notifications down to one per incident.
    • A vehicle that loses its route now keeps driving toward open street instead of parking on the spot, and only gives up if it is truly stuck with nowhere to go.

  40. Version 0.16.0

    • Rail Island now has trams: lay tram track (single or double, plain or paved into the road, with overhead wire), build a tram out of multiple coupled cars, and run it alongside your buses and trains.
    • Added the Rebuild road tool, the road equivalent of Reconstruct rail: repave an existing street between asphalt, paved and tram-track surfaces without redrawing it, keeping its junctions, bus stops and traffic intact.
    • Two trams meeting head-on on single track no longer lock up: one waits in a passing place while the other goes by, then carries on.
    • Starting every vehicle at once now tells you about each bus or tram that failed to start, instead of only the first.
    • New buses and trams now come with a full route already filled in, instead of a single stop that immediately refuses to start.
    • Fixed a repeating "add at least two stops" warning that kept popping up for buses and trams that were already running fine.
    • Fixed buses and trams drifting slightly at track and road joints, bunching up when leaving a stop, and sometimes stopping short of or driving past long stops on wide avenues.
    • Upscaled tram textures for a sharper look.

  41. Version 0.15.0

    • Buses meeting head-on now give way properly: one backs into the nearest side street while the other edges past, then carries on to its own stop -- instead of the two squeezing past each other side by side.
    • The station tool can now dock a new station against a building you click, just like the house tool already does, instead of dropping the platform straight through it.
    • The Analyse tool now shows a bus's full driven route and its footprint on the road, matching what it has long shown for trains.
    • Fixed buses looping strangely through some sharp road junctions instead of following a smooth curve.
    • Fixed articulated buses rendering with their sections folded together or facing the wrong way while backing up.
    • Improved performance on busy islands: smoother framerates, much faster terrain sculpting, and less lag on the minimap while many trains are running.

  42. Version 0.14.1

    • Fixed leaving your island sometimes wiping out every station, bridge and tunnel from your save while leaving everything else untouched.
    • Fixed trains jumping or teleporting after you edited rail track they were running on or near, instead of continuing smoothly from where they were.
    • Fixed track that snaps onto another line at a different level -- such as a tunnel passing under a station -- sometimes getting an odd little bump right at the junction instead of a smooth grade.

  43. Version 0.14.0

    • The Arched train shed station is now free for everyone; it used to be a Rail Island PLUS station type.
    • Custom woods -- creating, editing and painting your own tree mixes -- is now a Rail Island PLUS feature. Woods you already painted keep growing exactly as before on any plan.
    • Locked PLUS station, bridge and woods types can now be selected in their pickers to preview them in 3D, even without PLUS; you just cannot place one until you upgrade.
    • The station and bridge pickers now show a sharp, rotating 3D preview of each type instead of a small fixed picture, matching the preview already used elsewhere in the game.
    • Fixed name labels for cities, stations and bus stops sometimes floating on top of menus, boards and the top bar instead of staying behind them.
    • Fixed the first-person Drive camera still showing station, bus-stop and city name labels that should have been hidden while driving.

  44. Version 0.13.0

    • Signals now have two new one-way states in addition to the usual two-way and gate settings. A one-way signal governs traffic heading in one direction only, and trains running the other way pass it as if it weren't there at all, unlike a gate, which still blocks or reroutes them.
    • Cycling a signal now steps through five settings instead of three: two-way, the two gate directions, and the two new one-way directions.
    • The signal tool's direction arrows now show three distinct looks -- guarded, blocked, or not affected -- so you can tell at a glance exactly what a signal does in each direction.

  45. Version 0.12.0

    • Steam locomotives now trail smoke from their chimney: a light wisp while standing at a platform, a steadier plume while running on the flat, and a heavy billow while accelerating or climbing a grade.
    • The tunnel tool now shows a cover gauge while you draw a bore: a column of colour at intervals along the tube shows how much ground is above it, turning red wherever the tube would break out of the hillside instead of staying buried.
    • The tunnel tool can now see through hills the same way the semaphore tool does, so the track and the bore you are drawing show through the terrain instead of being hidden inside it.
    • Fixed explosion debris freezing in place at the blast instead of flying outward and settling on the ground.
    • Fixed the smoke plume on three steam locomotive models drifting away from the chimney instead of rising from it.

  46. Version 0.11.0

    • Added guided in-game tutorials: step-by-step lessons that walk you through building your first train and signalling two trains sharing a line, with narration and on-screen pointers showing exactly what to click.
    • Tutorials are reachable from the start screen and, while playing, from a new '?' button in the top bar; a step list lets you jump straight to any step instead of stepping through one at a time, and you can pause a lesson at any point to try the tools yourself before resuming.
    • Finishing a tutorial now leaves your island and trains running instead of freezing them, with a 'Tutorial finished' badge in place of the playback controls.
    • Each map now has its own Show tutorials setting, so you can hide the tutorials button once you no longer need it.
    • Fixed a bug where two trains could collide at a rail crossing (where two tracks cross without connecting) because the signalling system did not recognize the crossing as a conflict.
    • Fixed the station tool levelling far more ground around a new platform than the platform actually needed.

  47. Version 0.10.0

    • The What's New panel now shows release notes in your own language instead of English only, for all 14 supported languages.
    • The version heading in What's New no longer shows a release date, just the version number.
    • Fixed submenus like the language picker sometimes opening partly off the edge of the screen; they now stay fully on screen on both phones and desktop.
    • Fixed the rail tool tabs on portrait phones showing their icon next to the label instead of above it, which could crowd out the label text.
    • On/off menu items such as Debug controls and the current language now show a real checkbox instead of just a color change, so it is clear at a glance whether they are on.
    • Removed the redundant word 'squares' from the map size picker, which now shows just the dimensions.

  48. Version 0.9.1

    • Fixed trains sometimes loading with their cars squashed together into a short stub instead of their proper length, most noticeable on a cold page load with a train parked at a red signal -- the fix makes sure each train's full car lengths are known before it starts moving.

  49. Version 0.9.0

    • Admins can now download any published island straight from the gallery, not just the ones they published themselves -- every gallery card gets an export button for them.
    • The downloaded file is the same portable ZIP that the in-game Export game writes, so it can be re-imported as a map like any other export.
    • The exported copy carries the island's public author name and publish date along with it, exactly as shown on its gallery card.

  50. Version 0.8.0

    • Stations and bus stops built inside or near a town now take a name based on that town instead of a generic name from anywhere on the map -- a town's first station becomes its Main Station, and later stations and bus stops draw from a set of local-sounding names, in every supported language.
    • The rename dialog for stations and bus stops now has a Suggest button that proposes a name using these new rules and fills it in for you -- confirm with Rename to keep it, or click Suggest again for another option.
    • Overhead wires on electric rail now follow the real structure of bridges instead of floating over open air -- trusses, cantilevers, cable-stayed spans, arches and suspension bridges each carry their wires from their own towers, struts or bracing.
    • Overhead wires inside tunnels now hang from the tunnel ceiling with no masts crowding the bore, and masts on the approach now keep clear of the tunnel portal instead of landing on it.
    • Stations now get a shared overhead-wire mast between each pair of tracks instead of none at all, and the wires run cleanly through the station instead of vanishing under the roof.
    • Fixed a bug where a saved island's overhead wires could come back wrong after loading or after an undo -- masts through station roofs and inside tunnels, wires that did not match the real tracks -- because the wire layout was worked out before the island's stations, bridges and tunnels had finished loading.
    • Fixed a shared mast at the end of a multi-track dead end not appearing for every track, leaving some wires without an anchor.
    • Placing a station now builds its tracks using whichever rail type is currently selected, so choosing Electric before placing a station gives it wired tracks instead of always defaulting to plain wooden ones.

  51. Version 0.7.0

    • Added rail-road level crossings: where a road crosses a track, the rail now runs through cleanly with no road surface breaking it up, and a pair of flashing red signal lights warns drivers when a train is coming.
    • Buses now stop and wait clear of a level crossing while a train is approaching or passing through, then carry on once it is safe.
    • Villages now grow along a single street instead of copying the layout of a full town -- houses and, occasionally, a small church line one road with no town square, giving villages their own distinct look.
    • While placing a city, the preview now shows the actual building models instead of plain boxes, so you can see what you are about to build as it takes shape.
    • Fixed trains appearing to sink slightly into the track ballast instead of sitting on top of the rails.
    • Fixed overhead contact wires and their masts: the wire is now at the correct height for a train's pantograph to reach, and masts stand rooted in the ground instead of floating above it.
    • Cleaned up the toolbar's Cancel, step-back and Back buttons so every tool behaves the same way: Cancel only appears when there is something to discard, and pressing Escape discards unfinished work before it closes the tool.
    • Fixed a saved simulation losing its bus stops on replay, which could make a bus vanish from the vehicle list even though it ran fine live.

  52. Version 0.6.2

    • Rail ballast, sleepers, and bridge decks now render with richer, more realistic materials that respond to light and shadow instead of flat colors.
    • Roads, gravel paths, wooden surfaces, and pavement across the island now use sharper, higher quality textures.
    • Fixed flickering on the stone and brick masonry of arch bridges, where the arches and side walls used to shimmer depending on camera angle.
    • Fixed multi-lane bridge decks drifting out of alignment on curves.
    • The Arch Bridge is now built from concrete instead of stone, matching its updated description.

  53. Version 0.6.1

    • Fixed rail track on curves looking broken -- the ballast bed and rail heads used to show as a jagged fan of overlapping and gapped segments through a bend; they now sweep smoothly around the curve instead.
    • Fixed bridge decks and parapets on curved bridges showing overlapping sections on the inside of the curve and gaps on the outside; they now follow the curve as one continuous, correctly aligned surface.
    • Sharper, tighter curves on rail and bridges now render more accurately, since the game re-samples the path more finely through tight turns.

  54. Version 0.6.0

    • Added Reconstruct rail, a new Railroad tool that re-types a stretch of existing track without demolishing and re-laying it -- pick the rails, choose the new type, and confirm.
    • Published island links now use a shorter /pub/ address; links you already shared using the old address still work.
    • Islands embedded on the Rail Island website now get a Back button when opened as a full page, so you can return to the page you came from.
    • The sign-in screen no longer lets the list of published islands crowd the sign-in card on phones -- it is hidden there, and on desktop it now lines up with the card and shows only the top 3 islands.

  55. Version 0.5.0

    • Published islands now show a picture on their gallery card, taken automatically the moment you hit Publish -- islands published before this update will still show without one.
    • Fixed articulated buses' joints looking bent or offset in sharp corners -- the two halves of the bus now hinge together properly instead of drifting apart.
    • Buses now corner more realistically: only the front of the bus follows the road exactly, while the rest trails behind and cuts the corner, instead of sweeping wide like a train.
    • Improved performance when many articulated buses are on screen at once.

  56. Version 0.4.0

    • Rail Island now speaks 14 languages: German, Spanish, French, Italian, Hungarian, Dutch, Polish, Brazilian Portuguese, Slovak, Korean, Japanese and Simplified Chinese join English and Czech, each with its own set of town and island names.
    • Added an Undo button (and Ctrl/Cmd+Z) for construction: rail, road, bridges, tunnels, stations, bus stops, semaphores, buildings, cities, Destroy and terrain sculpting can all be stepped back, with Redo (Ctrl/Cmd+Y) to restore what you undid. Editing a train or bus's route, name or cars is undoable too.
    • The semaphore tool can now see through hills and buildings while placing signals, so you can aim at rail hidden inside a tunnel or under a building. A new overlay shows every semaphore's position and the directions it governs at a glance.
    • Semaphores can now be placed on bridges and inside tunnels, not just open track; they still cannot be placed on station platforms, which get a warning explaining why.
    • Buses with jointed, multi-section bodies now bend naturally around curves instead of moving as one rigid shape.
    • The game now pauses automatically when you switch away from the tab or the window loses focus, and picks back up right where it left off instead of having trains and construction race ahead while you were gone.
    • Fixed exported maps losing their name when re-imported -- an imported map now keeps the name it was exported with.
    • The app now loads noticeably faster, since it only downloads the language you are actually using instead of all 14 at once.

  57. Version 0.3.1

    • Fixed tunnels crossing under an existing rail, road or building -- the bore now dips down to duck under it instead of failing to build or leaving it buried in a hidden pit.
    • Fixed stations built above a tunnel failing to appear -- the platform now raises to clear the tunnel underneath.
    • Fixed city construction on a hill raised by a tunnel being rejected outright -- now only a building that truly cannot fit is dropped, and the rest of the city still gets built.
    • Terrain now shows richer color variation by type, giving the landscape a more natural look.

  58. Version 0.3.0

    • Tunnels and bridges can now be built as long as you like -- the old length cap that blocked long structures is gone.
    • Tunnels now shape the real ground above them: the hill over a bore is solid terrain that other construction can no longer dig through, and destroying a tunnel no longer leaves dark patches behind.
    • Rail and road can now be built across a tunnel's hill or under a bridge deck -- the track automatically rises or dips to clear it instead of being rejected.
    • Building near a bridge, tunnel or station no longer snaps track onto their deck or bore, so it is finally possible to draw rail over a tunnel.
    • Two new map sizes: Micro for a quick build, and X-Large for players who want the most room, both shown with their grid dimensions in the size picker.
    • Added keyboard camera controls: pan with WASD or the arrow keys, rotate with Q/E, zoom with F/G and tilt with H/J.
    • Added email sign-in as an alternative to Google -- request a one-time link and click it to sign in.
    • Play time is now tracked per map and shown on your map cards.

  59. Version 0.2.1

    • Fixed the Stops list on train and bus boards highlighting the wrong visit when a route stops at the same station more than once -- only the stop the vehicle is actually heading for is now marked.

  60. Version 0.2.0

    • Six new PLUS station types: the Grand terminus, Arched train shed, Cantilever wings, Overhead concourse, Village depot and Heritage umbrella canopy, each with its own architecture and name boards.
    • Publishing an island that earns five stars now automatically grants its owner a free year of Rail Island PLUS.
    • Starred islands can no longer be removed from the gallery, so the stars other players gave are never lost; star counts now show as a gold glyph.
    • Fixed station name boards being hidden by roofs or missing at some platforms and depots.
    • Fixed the vehicle list, boards and minimap sometimes showing no trains or buses for a few seconds right after opening a map.
    • Fixed trains being routed onto or attached to platforms they could not continue from, which could strand them mid-journey.
    • Fixed rail construction near existing buildings sometimes burying them into the terrain.
    • Fixed trees appearing to grow straight through bridges.

  61. Version 0.1.0

    • Build islands in the browser: generate terrain, lay rail and roads, and place stations, buildings and woods.
    • Run trains and buses on your network, with signals, reservations and timetabled stops.
    • Sign in with Google to keep your maps saved to your own account, with backups.
    • Publish an island to the gallery, collect stars from other players, and earn Rail Island PLUS.
    • Play in English or Czech.

Start building on your island

Choose a map, lay your first tracks, and send a train along them. Rail Island is free to play.

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