The Other Model Railway Games, Compared Honestly

Model railway games are a small genre with a long history. What else is on the shelf compares Traluno with the games it merely resembles; this one compares it with the handful that share its actual subject: a model railway, on a baseboard, in a room. Most people have never heard of any of them, and every one of them has something worth stealing. If you have not seen Traluno itself, a free train set game in your browser is the short tour.

Trainz Railroad Simulator

The oldest and by far the largest. The first Trainz came out in October 2001 from the Australian studio Auran, now N3V Games (Wikipedia). It is sold today as the Trainz Plus membership and as Trainz 22, for PC and Mac, with mobile and Xbox versions alongside (trainzsimulator.com), and its Download Station holds over 600,000 free items (Steam).

What it does better: scope, and it is not close. Trainz routes are railways at 1:1, real lines among them, with AI trains run by driver commands and you at the controls of your own, and its Surveyor tools let you build the landscape rather than dress it.

Where it differs: Trainz is mostly a railway simulator that also caters for model railways. Its centre of gravity is the prototype, the real railway, and the model railway is a branch of it: TRS22 Model Railroaders Edition, from January 2025, is built round designing your own model railways, and a route's world scale can be set to HO instead of 1:1.

Traluno starts from the model and never leaves it. There is no 1:1 mode, no real route, and no prototype fidelity to live up to. That is a much smaller ambition, and it means the room, the table and the person standing at the front edge are the fixed points rather than a framing device.

The thing worth stealing: Trainz's content ecosystem. A layout game lives or dies on how much stuff there is to put on it, and Trainz solved that by letting users make the stuff. Traluno's catalogue is fixed and authored, which keeps the two material languages consistent and puts a hard ceiling on variety.

Rolling Line

The closest thing to a direct comparison, and the one people who know the genre bring up first. Rolling Line, from Gaugepunk Games, came out on Steam in April 2018, and its store page puts the premise exactly: you "operate table-top model railways standing in human-scale", in VR or on an ordinary PC.

What it does better: VR, and the tactility that comes with it. You can pick wagons up and throw them as physics objects, or push them along the rails with your hands, and a mouse cannot match that. It also has the community Traluno lacks: the Steam Workshop holds over 7,000 layouts and over 20,000 mods and liveries, and you can play it in multiplayer.

Where it differs: Rolling Line builds "huge (or tiny) railways", as big as you care to make them. Traluno is deliberately domestic: one table to start, standing in a hobby room, a cellar, a Bali pavilion or a garden, and a second table is a $9.99 purchase you feel (from one table to four covers the rest).

The control interface differs too. Rolling Line gives you DCC-style hand-held controllers. Traluno bolts a control desk to the front of the table and makes you drag its levers, which is slower, and which is the whole point; the per-train controls live in a window that controlling trains and switches walks through.

The thing worth stealing: its physicality. Rolling Line understands that the pleasure of the hobby is partly in handling the objects, and it is the one thing a browser game with a mouse will always be worse at.

Model Railway Easily

The gentlest of the lot, and nearer to Traluno in temperament than any other entry here. Model Railway Easily is from Redbrick Studios and has been on Steam, for Windows, since January 2020; Model Railway Easily 2 runs on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple Vision. You lay track with as many switches as you like, add buildings, plants and roads, and push an engine to start it. Trains stop at the stations you place, and at a dead end they stop and reverse after a few seconds.

What it does better: the landscape. In the sequel the track runs up and down hills, and you make hills, valleys, rivers and bays and paint them. All of Traluno's track is at one height, and its ground is paint on a flat board.

Where it differs: Model Railway Easily is a sandbox on open ground. Traluno's layout stands on a table in a room with a desk on the front edge, and that frame is the point rather than a backdrop.

The thing worth stealing: gradients. A line that climbs is half of what makes a model railway look like a railway, and it is the most visible thing Traluno leaves out.

The track planners

Not games at all, but the software that model railway games get mistaken for: AnyRail, SCARM, XTrackCAD, RailModeller Pro and their relatives, aimed squarely at planning.

What they do better: precision planning. They draw with the manufacturers' own track libraries, so every radius and clearance is exact, and they produce a list of parts you can actually buy. AnyRail has libraries for Atlas, Märklin, Lionel, Roco, Peco and many others, SCARM prints a parts list with part numbers, and RailModeller Pro, on the Mac, keeps a priced parts list for each layout. Some run trains as well: XTrackCAD, which is free and open source, simulates running trains.

Where it differs: they are tools with a run mode, at most. Traluno is a game with a build mode. Nothing in Traluno will tell you the part number of a curve or whether your plan fits a 6×4 board in real millimetres, and before you open a model train layout planner is about using the two together.

The thing worth stealing: the honesty of their geometry. A planning tool cannot fudge a radius, and Traluno does not pretend to offer a continuum either: there is exactly one curve, a quarter turn inside one cell. A fixed set of pieces that always fit together is how sectional track works, and it is less frustrating than free-form track that nearly meets, even though Traluno's one curve is far tighter than any real HO radius.

BAHN, and the 2D era

BAHN is a German railway network simulator by Jan Bochmann of Dresden, first published in July 1993 and still maintained: version 3.89r5 came out in May 2023 (jbss.de). It covers railways, trams, S-Bahn and U-Bahn on a flat grid of track elements, 65,536 of them on a side (heise), and it is shareware with a 92-day trial (jbss.de). It is the ancestor of a lot of thinking in this space.

What it does better: clarity, and the scale of operation. A view from above shows you the whole network at once, BAHN runs more than 1,000 trains at a time on several hundred kilometres of track, and you can change the operation while the traffic runs.

Where it differs: it is a diagram, not a scene. You are reading a network, not looking at a model.

The thing worth stealing: operation as the purpose. Traluno's trains run, pause at a station if they are the kind that calls at one, and reverse at the ends; they do not keep time. A layout where trains had somewhere to be at a particular minute would give operating a purpose it currently lacks, and it is the single most obvious gap in the game.

Märklin, Hornby and the manufacturers' software

The big manufacturers have published their own layout software, built round a catalogue of their own track. Hornby's Virtual Railway came out for Windows in 2001, with a sequel in 2003: you built a layout from fixed track, rolling stock, scenery and buildings, then ran the trains on it. Hornby's later Track-Master, from 2011, is a flat 2D planner that prints a shopping list at Hornby's retail prices. Märklin still sells Track Planning 2D/3D, now version 12 on a USB stick, in German only, with the Märklin, Trix and LGB track systems and 25 3D models. Lionel licensed its name to a game instead: 3D Ultra Lionel TrainTown, a model railroad puzzle game from Sierra in 1999.

What they do better: the parts are real. You plan with the actual products, and the catalogue is the point.

Where it differs: those are planning tools first, made to sell track, and the running hangs off the plan rather than the other way round. Traluno's simulation is the part most of the work went into.

The thing worth stealing: nothing, honestly, except the reminder that a catalogue of consistent, well-made parts is more valuable than an infinite editor most people never open.

Also worth knowing

• EEP (Eisenbahn.exe Professional), from the German publisher Trend: a commercial 3D model railway simulation for the PC, from a series that began in 1998, with version 18 out in February 2025.
• 3D Train Studio, by Stefan Werner, on Steam since January 2025: over 2,000 tracks from well-known manufacturers, and a complete railway operation to simulate on them.
• Train Yard Builder, from GameFormatic, released in September 2024: a sandbox for building and running a model railway.

Which model train game to pick

	Traluno	Trainz	Rolling Line	Planning tools
Subject	the model	the prototype, with model layouts too	the model	the plan
Content	a fixed catalogue	over 600,000 free items	7,000+ Workshop layouts	manufacturers' track libraries
Operating	desk levers, per-train windows	your own cab, AI drivers	hand-held controllers	a run mode in some
Where it runs	a browser tab, phones too	PC and Mac, mobile, Xbox	PC, with or without VR	mostly Windows; some on Mac and Linux

Traluno is the smallest and least capable entry in almost every row. What it has instead is that it opens in a tab, that it is about a table in a room rather than a railway in a landscape, and that everything in it (the loading gauge, the curve radius, the two material languages, the desk on the front edge) follows from taking that framing literally.

If you want to simulate a railway, Trainz. If you want to hold the trains, Rolling Line. If you want something gentle on an iPad, Model Railway Easily. If you want to buy real track with confidence, a planning tool. If you want to build a small layout, watch it run, and lean on the front edge of the table while you do it, that is the one we are trying to make.