Microsoft Train Simulator (abbreviated as MSTS) is a train simulator for Microsoft Windows, released in July 2001 and developed by UK based Kuju Entertainment, and is available for purchase through Amazon.com.
The game revolves around driving trains on world maps called routes. Seven routes are included, with two in Japan, two in the United States, and the rest being set in the UK and Austria in addition to a tutorial one. These routes range from European steam railways, the Odakyu Electric Railway in Tokyo, the BNSF Railway's Northern Transcon route over Marias Pass, and Amtrak's Northeast Corridor between Philadelphia and Washington DC. (There is a seventh route designated for tutorials) The player may drive trains freely from a starting point or run activities such as driving and stopping a passenger train or shunting/switching freight cars.
Users may create or download custom trains, routes, and activities for the game, not to mention the many modifications that fix bugs and therefore helped increase the game's lifespan. The game was popular in the Rail Enthusiast community, although it is out-of-print, graphically outdated, has compatibility issues on newer PCs, and has been succeeded by newer train simulators sold on digital storefronts that are much more convenient to install, which have led to a decline of the MSTS player-base aside from a thriving community based in India.
Fortunately, MSTS has been gradually supplanted by an open-source train simulator called Open Rails
, which can run MSTS content as well as advanced features and content that are not compatible with MSTS. The working efforts of the Open Rails team and devoted addon developers are perhaps the best hopes for MSTS to stay relevant.
There was a Microsoft Train Simulator 2 which got canceled twice, in 2004 and in 2009.
The game has a commercial Spiritual Successor of some sort, sporting the different names Rail Simulator / Rail Works / Train Simulator 20XX. Rail Simulator was also developed by Kuju, but starting with its successor Railworks it has been developed by a new company that later evolved into the simulator-focused Dovetail Games, which also re-released Microsoft Flight Simulator X on Steam.
This Video Game contains examples of:
- Artistic License – Geography: Many of the routes feature some artistic compromises.
- The Northeast Corridor route is missing a fair number of details along it, many of which were added back in by third party developers.
- The Marias Pass route in real life features several impressive iron trestles on it, at Cut Bank, either end of the East Glacier siding, Java, and Sheep Creek (between Java West and Essex). In MSTS, only the Two Medicine trestle at East Glacier is depicted accurately. The Cut Bank, Java and Sheep Creek trestles are depicted as ordinary bridges, while the East Glacier trestle is missing entirely. Modified versions of the route have added in the trestles, corrected switches at crossovers and single-to-double track transitions to 5 degree switches (as opposed to 10 degree switches), and smoothened the gradients on hills from 5% to a more realistic 1-2% grades, with the benefit of making it easier to operate heavy freight trains over the pass.
- Anachronism Stew: The original routes are locked to certain eras: the US and Japanese routes to the early 21st century, the European routes to the 1930s. However, rolling stock is not geo-locked, and it means with third party equipment, it is possible to use some suspension of disbelief to, for example, create activities for Marias Pass set during the Great Northern or Burlington Northern periods, or the Northeast Corridor pre-Amtrak.
- Cool Train: Plenty of available (third-party) trains which count as this, as well as fictional ones.
- Downloadable Content: The Class 50, BNSF SD40-2 and associated wagons were released as content for the game's version 1.2 update.
- Flying Saucer: A
Dummied Out unidentified flying object shape is among the files for the Marias Pass route. - Just Train Wrong:
- BNSF 4723's horn sounds nothing like the MSTS variant.
- The Acela Express has a horn that sounds like this, when in MSTS it and the HHP-8 have horns that sound more like a tugboat.
- The Flying Scotsman in the 1920s did not have a speedometer. This is acknowledged by the narrator in the steam tutorial as being an anachronism made to help out modern gamers.
- BNSF 4723's horn sounds
- Scenery Porn: A feature in third-party routes with vivid scenery.
- Sliding Scale of Video Game World Size and Scale: A hybrid of "Realistic scale, locked doors everywhere" and "Realistic scale, tons of buildings enterable" since numerous routes are modeled after real railway lines and nearly accurately scalednote and many railcars (including player-pulled passenger cars that came with the game) have rendered interiors, although buildings tend not to have interiors.
- Work Info Title: As with Microsoft Flight Simulator, the game's genre is denoted by its title.
