Terms of Service

1. Who we are

Rail Island is operated by the provider identified at the foot of this page — referred to below as “we”, “us” and “our”. You can reach us at any time by email; the address is in that same card, and it is the right address for questions about these terms, about your data, and about a payment.

Rail Island PLUS subscriptions are not sold by us directly. They are sold by Paddle, which acts as the merchant of record: Paddle is the seller shown on your receipt, it takes the payment, it handles sales tax, and it processes refunds. Buying PLUS therefore means agreeing to Paddle’s buyer terms in addition to these ones. Everything about the game itself is between you and us.

2. What Rail Island is

Rail Island is a transport-building game that runs in a web browser at play.railisland.com. You shape an island, lay track and roads, build stations, bridges and tunnels, and run trains, buses, trams, ships and cable cars across it. This website, railisland.com, describes the game and links to it.

The game is under active development. Tools, vehicles, buildings and limits change from release to release, and what changed in each release is published on our changelog page. We may add, alter or withdraw features, and we may change what the FREE and PLUS tiers include — but where a change would materially reduce what a paid subscription gives you, section 6 says what happens.

3. Your account

Playing requires an account. There are two ways to create one, and they behave differently in a way worth knowing before you pick:

Sign in with Google

We receive your Google account identifier, your email address, your name and your profile picture from Google.

Sign in with an email link

You type an email address and we send a one-time link to it. The link works once and expires 15 minutes after it is sent. You can request at most 5 links per address per hour.

The two are separate accounts even when they use the same email address. Signing in with Google and signing in with a link to the same mailbox gives you two independent accounts with two independent island collections, and we cannot merge them. Pick one and stay with it.

A magic link is a key to your account, so treat it like a password: do not forward it, and do not post it anywhere. You are responsible for what happens under your account and for keeping control of the mailbox or Google account it is reached through. Tell us straight away if you think somebody else has got in.

Age

You must be at least 13 years old to have a Rail Island account. If you are under 18, you may only use Rail Island with the permission of a parent or guardian, and only a person aged 18 or over may buy a subscription or authorise a payment. If you are a parent or guardian and your child has an account you did not agree to, write to us and we will close it and delete what it holds.

Your display name

Every account has a public display name — up to 32 characters — which is the author credit shown on the gallery card of any island you publish. Until you choose one, it defaults to the first word of your Google name, or the part of your email address before the @, or simply “Player”. Your email address, your full Google name and your profile picture are never made public. Choose a display name that you are happy for strangers to see, and see section 8 for what it may not contain.

4. Free play and Rail Island PLUS

Every build tool in Rail Island is free, and so is the Creator — making your own models and woods types costs nothing on either tier. There is one paid tier, Rail Island PLUS, and what it changes is how much room you have:

Saved islands are charged against your storage points by size — a micro or small island costs 1 point, a medium 2, a large 3 and an x-large 5 — so the number of islands you can keep depends on how big they are. Re-saving an island you already have costs nothing further. These figures are the ones the game enforces today; if we change them, the change is published in the changelog.

Anything you have already built stays built. A station, a bridge or a stretch of woodland placed while you held PLUS keeps standing and keeps rendering after PLUS ends — the tier gates what you can create, never what already exists. The same holds for privacy on a Creator upload: a model or woods type that is already private stays private if your subscription lapses. What PLUS gates is making a new one private.

5. The three ways to hold PLUS

Subscribe

A monthly subscription bought through Paddle. Section 6 covers it.

Earn it with a five-star island

Publish an island, and if it collects 5 stars from 5 different players you get PLUS free for three months, automatically. It is one award per account, once ever, and it is offered only to accounts that have never had a paid subscription. This is a promotion rather than a permanent feature: we may withdraw it at any time, though withdrawing it never shortens an award already made. Losing the stars afterwards does not shorten it either.

A grant from us

We can switch an account to PLUS by hand — for a tester, a bug report worth thanking somebody for, or a support case. A grant like this is a gift with no end date and no payment behind it, and we can withdraw it.

The three are independent and your tier is worked out fresh every time you load the game, from whichever of them lasts longest. Subscribing while a five-star award is still running does not waste either one: you keep PLUS until the later of the two dates.

6. The PLUS subscription

What it costs

The price is the one shown to you in the Paddle checkout before you confirm, in your own currency and including any tax Paddle is required to add. We deliberately quote no figure here, because Paddle’s figure is the one you will actually be charged.

How it renews

It is a monthly subscription. It renews automatically, at the same price, until you cancel it, and Paddle charges the payment method you gave it.

How to cancel

Open the account menu in the game and choose Manage subscription; that opens Paddle’s customer portal, where you can cancel or change your payment card. Cancelling stops the next renewal. It does not cut PLUS off on the spot — you keep it until the end of the period you have already paid for.

If a payment fails

Paddle retries a failed payment for several days. You keep PLUS during those retries rather than losing it the moment a card expires. If no payment succeeds, PLUS ends when the paid period runs out.

If we change the price

We will tell you by email before a changed price applies to a renewal, in time for you to cancel first if you would rather not pay it.

Refunds have their own page — see the Refund Policy, which forms part of these terms.

If we make a change that materially reduces what PLUS gives you and you do not want to continue on the new terms, write to us: we will cancel your subscription and refund the unused part of the period you have already paid for.

7. What you build, and what you upload

The islands you build are yours. We claim no ownership of them, and nothing here transfers your rights in them to us.

To run the game we need permission to store your islands and send them back to your browser, so you give us a licence to host, store, copy and display them for that purpose. It lasts as long as you keep the island on the service and ends when you delete it or your account.

Publishing an island

Publishing is optional and it is a decision to make something public. A published island is readable by anyone on the internet, with or without a Rail Island account: its name, its thumbnail, its star count, your public display name and the island itself all become visible in the gallery and through our public gallery API, and this website shows published islands on its home page. Publishing extends the licence above to cover showing your island to other people, including in and around this website, for as long as it stays published.

You can unpublish an island at any time, which removes it from the gallery. Copies other people already downloaded or screenshots already taken are, in the nature of the internet, beyond our reach.

Models and woods you make in the Creator

The Creator lets you upload your own 3D models — a building, a train, a bus, a tram, a ship, an aircraft or a cable-car cabin — and build your own woods types out of the game’s tree species. Both are free on either tier. What you upload stays yours, on exactly the terms above: we claim no ownership, and the licence you give us is the one we need to store it, convert it and send it back to a browser that has to draw it.

Only upload a model you actually have the right to upload. A mesh ripped from another game, bought under a licence that forbids redistribution, or downloaded from a site whose terms you have not read is exactly what the second bullet of section 8 is about. If somebody tells us an upload infringes their rights, we will look at it and we may unlist or delete it.

Every model and woods type is either public or private, and which one you get depends on your tier. On the free plan everything you make is public: it is listed in the Creator’s Community library under your display name, and any other player can find it and place it on their own island. Rail Island PLUS is what lets you keep a new one to yourself. Making something public is a decision to share it — treat it the way you would treat publishing an island.

Two things about private are worth being plain about, because “private” here means unlisted rather than locked. A private model appears in nobody else’s listing, but the file it is stored in has a plain web address, and anyone who learns that address can fetch it — for instance, if you export an island that places it and send somebody the ZIP. And unlisting a public model takes it out of the Community library without deleting the file, so islands other players already built on it keep drawing it. Deleting is the one that removes the file, and it removes the model from every island that placed it.

Getting your islands out

Any island can be exported from the game as a ZIP file that holds its full data and can be re-imported later. The game also keeps recent snapshots of an island in your own browser’s storage. Those local snapshots live on the device you played on: clearing your browser data deletes them, and they are not a backup of your account.

8. What you may not do

While using Rail Island, do not:

• give an island, a line, a station or your display name a name that is unlawful, hateful, harassing, sexual, or that impersonates somebody else — anything you publish is read by other players, including children;
• publish or upload anything you do not have the right to publish — a 3D model you did not make and are not licensed to redistribute very much included — or anything that infringes somebody else’s rights;
• try to get around the FREE tier’s limits, tamper with the game’s requests to our servers, or use somebody else’s account;
• attack, overload, probe or reverse-engineer the service, or scrape it automatically beyond what our public gallery API openly offers;
• resell, sublicense or commercially redistribute the game or access to it;
• use Rail Island to do anything unlawful, or to distribute malware.

If you come across a published island, a display name or a model in the Community library that breaks these rules, email us and we will look at it.

9. Suspension, deletion and closing your account

You can stop using Rail Island whenever you like. To have your account and its islands deleted, email us from the address the account uses and ask; the Privacy Notice explains what deletion covers.

We may unpublish an island, unlist or delete an uploaded model or woods type, reset a display name, or suspend or close an account that breaks section 8 or the law. We will normally warn you first and explain what the problem is, unless the breach is serious enough or unlawful enough that warning first would be the wrong thing to do. If we close a paid account for a breach that was not your fault, we refund the unused part of the paid period; if we close it for a serious breach that was, we do not.

10. Availability, and what we do not promise

We run Rail Island with care but we do not promise it will be available without interruption or free of faults. It may go down for maintenance, because a third party we depend on is down, or because something broke.

We keep your islands on managed cloud storage and we take reasonable care of them, but no storage is infallible. If an island matters to you, export it — the ZIP export in section 7 exists for exactly that, and it is the only copy that is entirely in your hands.

Beyond what these terms expressly say, and to the extent the law allows, Rail Island is provided as it is, without further warranties.

11. Our liability

Nothing in these terms limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that the law does not permit us to limit. Your statutory rights as a consumer are not affected by anything written here.

Subject to that, we are not liable for indirect or consequential loss, for loss of profit or business, or for the loss of data that you could have kept a copy of yourself; and our total liability to you arising out of these terms is limited to the amount you paid us for Rail Island in the twelve months before the event that caused the claim. If you have never paid for Rail Island, that amount is nil, which is what free play costs.

12. Governing law and complaints

These terms are governed by the law of the Czech Republic, and the Czech courts have jurisdiction. If you are a consumer resident elsewhere in the European Union, this does not deprive you of the protection of any mandatory rules of the law of the country where you live, and you may also bring proceedings in your own courts.

Please write to us first — most things are settled in one email. If we cannot settle it between us and you are a consumer, you may refer the dispute to the Czech Trade Inspection Authority (Česká obchodní inspekce, www.coi.cz), which is the competent out-of-court dispute resolution body for consumer disputes with a Czech trader.

A complaint about a payment — a charge you did not expect, or one you want refunded — is usually quickest through the Refund Policy, since Paddle is the seller of record and holds the payment.

13. Changes to these terms

We may update these terms — because the game changes, or the law does. The date at the top of this page is when the current version took effect. If a change materially affects your rights and you have an account, we will tell you by email or in the game before it applies, and you are free to stop using Rail Island or cancel your subscription if you do not accept it. Continuing to use Rail Island after a change takes effect means you accept the updated terms.

These terms, together with the Privacy Notice and the Refund Policy, are the whole agreement between you and us about Rail Island. If any part of them turns out to be unenforceable, the rest still stands.

14. Language

Rail Island itself is playable in fourteen languages, but these terms are published in English only, and the English text is the binding one. If you translate this page — with your browser or anything else — the translation is for your convenience and has no legal effect.