News
Listen out for the unexpected in Train Sim World 6
A
Alan Wen
When I spoke to senior technical producer Lukas Klimczyk about the studio's latest installment at Gamescom 2025 ahead of its full reveal at Dovetail Direct, he told me what makes the simulation in the Train Sim World series so special.
"Other simulators out there try to do the whole world and then it just becomes an abstraction," he explained. "But we have every signal in its correct place and the correct name will have the correct functionality. We're so accurate that companies approach us for training!"
That is not to say that Train Sim World 6 is only for the hardcore train enthusiasts. Indeed, we wouldn't expect that every player will aim to play at the full realistic settings, which requires understanding all the safety systems for every train. "I mean, there's a reason why real drivers have to train for quite a while!" said Klimcyzk. "But some people just want to relax like it's virtual tourism."
In other words, there's quite a degree of freedom. Driving trains may be the headline of the simulation, but you can also be a conductor checking for valid tickets, or you can enjoy the ride as a humble passenger. Either way, you can then appreciate how the developers go to great lengths to recreate everything along the route, from the station and its surroundings to views from each route with 1:1 real-time accuracy.
That's also what makes each installment so special because rather than just a new lick of paint, you are getting new content each time, including new trains and routes. They hardly skimp on detail and scale either, since Train Sim World 6 includes the Dresden-Leipzig route in Germany, amounting to 150 kilometers and 43 stations, including a faithful recreation of Leipzig Hauptbahnhof, which at 83,460 square meters is the largest train station in Europe by floor area. You'll also be spoiled for scenic routes with the addition of the UK's Riviera Line that takes in some of the most beautiful sights along the coastline, including cliffs with both white chalk and red chalk.
But to come back to the little things that make for an authentic simulation, it's not just about what you can see, but what you can hear. One of the most requested features that Train Sim World 6 adds is audible announcements, and now that it's there, I can't believe it wasn't there already. Are you truly at a train platform if you can't hear someone telling you what the next station is through a speaker system?
To get it just right, Klimcyzk said the team has created a fully dynamic system so that these announcements will naturally sound different depending where you are. It's certainly a detail the team is keen to get right, knowing that the core community are also attentive to it, perhaps to the extent of recording announcements from station speakers on their phones.
"If you're sitting in the train, you'll either hear the driver speaking but like a muffle or from a speaker, so it's a lot more immersive. You'll also get some authentically bad English when they say, 'Thank you for travelling with Deutsche Bahn!'"
As for changes to gameplay, you'll also have the option to toggle a slider for random events, from sudden train faults to signal failure to a temporary speed restriction, which will introduce some unpredictable chaos in your challenge to have your train running on time. While that is naturally good for replayability, since no two journeys will be the same on any route, anyone who has encountered problems on a train also knows there's nothing more authentic. "It's so common in the real world, it just makes sense," said Klimcyzk.
Of course, Train Sim World 6 doesn't stop there, with more future add-ons to come in this release, featuring routes in new countries in Portugal, Czechia, and Japan, authentically recreated by teams local to the region. More importantly, established players will also be able to bring their existing collection of routes and trains over, which is also perhaps why Dovetail is in no hurry to make the leap from their heavily customized version of Unreal Engine 4.
"Unreal wasn't made for this amount of content, but some stuff that we made for this game actually went into the core engine too," said Klimcyzk. "Passenger density is still not quite where we want it to be, but you still get the effect when stations get busy, and photo mode also has fully simulated day, night and weather. Everything gets better each year."
Train Sim World 6 releases on Epic Games Store on September 30. You can preorder the standard edition, the deluxe edition, or special edition, with the deluxe and special editions also letting you play early starting on September 25.