Steam Rails

Steam Rails is a railway you build with your finger. The shire is drawn from above like a painted model layout: hedged fields in wheat and plough, woods full of round oaks, a river with reed beds along the bank, small towns with a church spire and red-brick cottages, and sheep wandering the pasture. Drag along the grid and the track lays itself, picking straights and curves as you go; cross the water and the piece becomes a timber trestle, run at a hill and it becomes a stone-mouthed tunnel. Tap a piece to turn it, and clear anything you regret for most of your coins back.

A line only earns once it carries something. Collieries make coal, timber yards make timber, dairies make milk and towns make post and passengers, and each of them is served by any station within two tiles. Buy a tank engine, an express or a heavy freight, give it a list of stops, and it loads whatever the yard has waiting and takes it to somewhere that wants it. Longer hauls pay more, quick ones pay a bonus, and an industry that gets a regular service grows and starts producing faster.

Run two engines on one line and you have a railway problem. A semaphore signal holds a train out of the stretch of track beyond it while another engine is in there, so single track with a passing loop becomes a puzzle worth solving; get it wrong and two trains meet nose to nose, come off the rails and cost you both time and money. Fifteen hand-drawn lines set the work — twenty loads of coal to the ironworks, four towns joined by one railway, five thousand coins before the light goes — and each is scored out of three stars on the clock. There is a sandbox valley with every industry and a bottomless purse when you would rather just build. Everything is kept in your browser, so a half-finished line is still there tomorrow.