To deliver an entire world of railroad experiences, Microsoft Train Simulator 2 offers two levels of accuracy and detail: a selection of four real-world routes rendered in high-accuracy detail, and the World of Rails (WoR), which replicates most of the world’s existing rail corridors with realistic scenery and track, ready to operate trains on “as is” or build out to your own specifications.
What is the World of Rails?
It’s easy to understand what a “high-accuracy” route is: we’ve hand-placed track and scenery objects to make you feel as if you’re in that specific location, with landmarks placed with geo-specific accuracy. We won’t place every house, tree, and rock in the right place, but if you’ve been to that specific location it should be immediately recognizable to you. Of course, because this is a train simulator, we’ve paid special attention to the track, track network objects such as signals, and track-side scenery. Building such highly specific and accurate routes is a painstaking and manual process, involving a huge amount of specific research and hand-crafting.
With Train Simulator 2, we wanted to provide a whole world of railroading experiences. So, using the Flight Simulator platform, we’ve added scenery and rail data for the entire world. When you leave the high-accuracy route areas, you enter the World of Rails. Using terabytes of data and sophisticated tools (more on that below), we’ve recreated the entire planet and most of its rail corridors, using geotypical scenery to give you a realistic (if not detail-accurate) sense of place. For example, if you place your train in Western Australia, you’ll see scenery typical of the Outback; in Los Angeles, you’ll see urban US buildings. You won’t see all the landmarks or every track, but you will see a realistic simulation of that region of the world.
Track in the WoR is navigable and operational. You don’t have to stop your game and load a new “level”; you can keep running down the track as far as it goes, even if that’s thousands of miles! All this is made possible by the way we gather and work with data to create the World of Rails.
The Data Behind the World of Rails
The world data behind the WoR consists of regional data subsets of varying resolution. To start with, we create the physical representation of the Earth, using the major data types shown in the following graphic. (Terrain Vector data includes water, rails, parks, utility lines, streams, and roads.)
The foundation of the World of Rails consists of six primary elements, starting from the bottom with a projection of the Earth itself.
This data is the foundation upon which the WoR rests. But there is so much more that goes into making the world you see and experience look and feel realistic. Just some of the additional data that goes into the simulated world: human footprint (population density, cultural regions), seasons, water classifications, and shipping lanes.
Because we use data from many different sources, they vary in their level of detail, so we have to rationalize them to work together. For example, we may have low-resolution data for water for a given area, but high-resolution rail network data. We identify these anomalies and produce a series of realistic transitions between data types. The result is a generic, data-driven world based on the real world.
Like our data in Flight Simulator, we get WoR data through third-party companies, many of which provide road and other data to products like Microsoft Virtual Earth and Live Search Maps. If you go to Road view in Live Search Maps you can see that the map has not only roads but also rails. Now if you switch to Aerial view you can see that often what is shown as one track in the Road view data is actually a set of several parallel tracks. We speak of our high-accuracy routes as having “track accuracy” (like the Aerial view) and the World of Rails as having “corridor accuracy” (like the Road view).
On top of these data sets that come from the real world, we make the track network usable, adding generic signals, speed limits, switches, tunnels, and bridges.
What Will the World of Rails Look Like?
The data behind the World of Rails is interesing, but what will it look like?
We've assembled some images that will show you the kind of scenery quality you'll find when you travel in the World of Rails. These screenshots were taken on Stevens Pass, which as you know is one of our high-accuracy scenery areas; however, aside from the high-resolution DEM here, everything you see here is indicative of the quality of the World of Rails scenery.
Of course, the whole world won't look like the Cascade foothills and conifer forests of Stevens Pass. Just like in Flight Simulator X, in Train Simulator 2 the world is divided into areas that include more than 140 urban, suburban, and rural land classes. Each land class has a set of textures that are basically aerial imagery. These textures are annotated with trees, buildings, and other objects that match the particular land class. For example, there are various urban land classes for gridlike cities, and different ones for cities that are more natural and curvy. These annotations are also regionalized, so that a grid city in the U.S. can have different buildings and trees than one in Europe, for instance.
Building on the World of Rails
The World of Rails is really an immense canvas on which you can run a train or build a route. You can customize and extend this framework with the powerful tools included with Train Simulator 2, allowing you to build highly accurate versions of your own favorite routes.
If you choose to, you can start building your route on top of the generic world we’ve provided, so you’ll have the basic land structure to work from and you don't have to manually place every single tree, bush, house, car, or other object. You can customize the track network, adding rails, placing signals, and so forth. You can add scenery and buildings, reshape the landscape, and make the world as accurate (or as fantastical) as you like.
When you’re done building, you can share your customized content with other virtual railroading enthusiasts.
A Whole World of Railroading Experiences
Train Simulator 2 offers the World of Rails for you to operate trains in a realistic environment anywhere you choose and to build custom routes starting from our data-driven generic version of the real world.