Rail planning
NIMBY Rails vs Cities: Skylines vs Simutrans
NIMBY Rails, Cities: Skylines and Simutrans reward useful passenger connections. Compare designing railways across existing geography, building the cities they serve and running a connected transport company.
Compare the three games
| Game at a glance | NIMBY Rails ↗ | Cities: Skylines ↗ | Simutrans ↗ |
|---|---|---|---|
| Vehicles | Rail in every form — tram, metro, commuter, regional and high-speed — and nothing else. No road vehicles, no ships, no aircraft. | Public transport of nearly every kind — buses, trams, metro, trains, monorail, ferries, cable cars, blimps and taxis, several of them through expansions — carrying citizens who genuinely need to get somewhere. | Trains, trams, monorails and maglevs, buses and trucks, ships and aircraft, all carrying passengers, mail and goods across one map. |
| Building | Free-form track drawn over the real world at 1cm resolution, threaded around the roads, streets and terrain OpenStreetMap already says are there. You shape the alignment; you do not shape the land. | Roads are drawn freehand with straight, curve and freeform tools, and the terrain can be sculpted; the zoning that fills in beside them snaps to a cell grid. | An isometric tile grid. Track, roads and waterways follow the squares, and the pak set you install — 64, 128 or 192 pixels to the tile — decides what the whole world looks like and how hard it is. |
| Towns and cities | Real ones, every city on Earth, straight from map data. They do not grow and they do not react, because they are not simulated — they are the world as it is. | The entire game. You zone, the buildings arrive on their own, and every citizen is simulated individually — the city grows or stalls on your services, traffic and budget. | Simulated. Towns grow when they are served, and every passenger and crate routes itself to a destination of its own, changing vehicles on the way. |
| Economy | Yes, and unusually detailed: individual simulated passengers, demand that changes by hour and weekday, fares, ratings and running costs. | Yes. Taxes, a service budget, loans and milestones, and a city that goes bankrupt if you get it wrong. | Yes, in full. Fares and freight revenue against purchase prices and maintenance costs, a company balance to keep in the black, and industries that only produce once you connect them. |
| Price and platforms | Paid ($19.99) on Steam for Windows and Linux, in Early Access since January 2021. The developer has said there will be no macOS port. No mobile or browser version. | Paid. The 2015 original runs on Windows, macOS and Linux and on PlayStation, Xbox and Switch. Cities: Skylines II (2023) is Windows only — its console versions are indefinitely delayed, and development passed from Colossal Order to Iceflake Studios at the start of 2026. Neither has a browser version. | Free and open source under the Artistic License 1.0 — the current stable release is 124.5 — for Windows, macOS and Linux, from simutrans.com and free on Steam. No browser build. |
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 NIMBY Rails for real-world railway routes and passenger timetables. Choose Cities: Skylines to build neighbourhoods and their public transport together. Choose Simutrans for passengers who transfer between services in a network that also carries mail and goods.
The map is the real world
Every other game on this list gives you a landscape it made up. NIMBY Rails gives you the one outside your window. The world is built from OpenStreetMap — the actual streets, the actual coastlines, the actual buildings — and you can build anywhere on it, at any scale, from a tram extension in your own suburb to a high-speed line across a continent.
That single decision is what the whole game is made of. Route planning stops being a matter of taste and becomes a matter of geography: the line has to get around that hill, through that town centre, past that industrial estate, because those things are where they really are.
Centimetre precision, no terraforming
Track is free-form and specified to a centimetre, with gradients, radii, bridges and tunnels all under your control. What you cannot do is move the ground. The world is data rather than terrain you own, so a hill in the way is a hill you route around, tunnel through or climb — never one you flatten.
The result plays much more like planning than like building. A lot of a NIMBY Rails session is spent zoomed in on an alignment, adjusting where the viaduct starts so it clears a real road, and the satisfaction is the same one a real alignment engineer gets.
Passengers, one at a time
The simulation is built on individual passengers rather than aggregate flows. Each one wants to get from somewhere to somewhere, at a particular time, and will use your network if it is the sensible way to do it. Demand varies by hour and by weekday, so the morning peak is a real thing your timetable either handles or does not.
That gives the fare box real meaning. Lines earn from the people who actually ride them, ratings reflect how well you served them, and the running costs of stock and infrastructure sit against that. A line drawn because it looked good on the map will tell you very quickly that nobody wanted it.
Lines, stock and timetables
You build lines rather than individual trains: an alignment, a set of stations, a fleet assigned to it, and a service pattern. Trams, metros, commuter services, regional trains and high-speed lines are all available, and a mature save usually has several of them layered over one city — which is the point, since that is how real networks are built.
Mods and the Workshop
The Steam Workshop carries a large library of community-made rolling stock, liveries and track types, which matters more here than in most games: with the real world as your map, players want the real operators' trains on it, and somebody has usually modelled them.
Building together
There is optional cooperative multiplayer, so several people can build on one world — a regional network each, or one metro system between them. It is cooperative rather than competitive: nobody is trying to take your passengers.
What it costs and where it runs
$19.99 on Steam, in Early Access since 26 January 2021, from Weird and Wry — the studio name of its developer, Carlos Carrasco. It runs on Windows and, since version 1.19, natively on Linux. There is no macOS version and the developer said in March 2026 that there will not be one. Nothing on mobile or in a browser.
Who it is for
NIMBY Rails is for the person who reads transit proposals for fun. If your idea of an evening is working out how a tram could actually reach a real suburb — and having the game tell you honestly whether anybody would ride it — nothing else comes close. If you wanted scenery and locomotives, this is not that.
Frequently asked questions
- Can I build in my own city in NIMBY Rails?
- Yes. The world is the whole planet, taken from OpenStreetMap, so your own town is in there with its real streets and buildings. Building a line through it at centimetre precision is the core of the game.
- Can I change the terrain in NIMBY Rails?
- No. The world is real map data rather than an editable landscape. You can bridge, tunnel, climb and curve around what is there, but you cannot flatten a hill or move a river.
- Does NIMBY Rails run on a Mac?
- No. It is sold on Steam for Windows and Linux, with a native Linux build since version 1.19, and the developer said in March 2026 that there will be no macOS port.
- Is there anything other than trains?
- No. NIMBY Rails is rail only — trams, metro, commuter, regional and high-speed services. There are no road vehicles, ships or aircraft.
