A Playmentum game · built with s&box
Railmentum
You run a train operating company on a railway you share with other people. You also drive the trains. Not on rails you laid yourself and not on a timetable that forgives you — on a working railway with real British signalling, where passing a signal at danger costs you money and a reputation you spent weeks building.
Early concept art — look and feel, not a final feature list.
The idea
Euro Truck Simulator’s shape, on a railway
Most train games make you a driver following instructions, or a tycoon watching trains from above. Railmentum is both at once, and the join between them is the game: the company decides what work exists, and driving that work yourself is the skilled, well-paid way to do it.
Hire someone and the service still runs — for a quarter of the money. Drive it yourself and it pays four times as much, and every mistake is yours.
That single trade-off runs through everything. A hired driver is safe, cheap and a bit sloppy: they run late, stop short of the mark, and occasionally do something genuinely daft. You are reliable and expensive to be wrong.
An evening
What actually happens when you sit down
- You join a server. It is whatever time it really is — the railway runs on the real clock, so an evening session is an evening on the railway.
- You spawn in your office, at a station you hold the rights to call at, and sit down at the computer. Everything you do as a company happens at that desk.
- The board offers work. Early on that is single journeys you drive yourself; once you can afford a driver, standing contracts that run for days and earn while you are asleep.
- You put a train and a driver on each one. The computer stops you making the obvious mistakes — a unit too short for the job, or too long for a platform on its route.
- Then you pick one you fancy, travel to it, and drive it. Signals, speed limits, a stopping mark to hit. Nothing holds your hand and nothing stops you getting it wrong.
- You log off. Your drivers keep working, your costs keep accruing, and it all nets out and catches you up when you’re back — so coming back after a fortnight is much the same as coming back tomorrow.
Why it’s different
Three things I care about getting right — and they’re all built
The signalling is real
Proper four-aspect British signalling, with the interlocking underneath it that decides what a signal is allowed to show. You can pass one at danger. The train stops itself and holds you there, and it goes on your record — and costs you money on the spot.
The railway is busy without you
Background traffic already runs the timetable whether or not you’re driving — real trains at real junctions, queuing for the platforms you booked. Giving each one a rival operator’s name and livery is the next piece; the traffic itself is already there.
Your mistakes are the economy
Late arrivals, missed calls and signals passed at danger cost real money and standing at that particular station, live, the moment they happen. Run a station badly enough for long enough and you lose the right to call there at all.
The company
What you spend money on
Trains
Bought outright. Classes genuinely differ in how they pull, brake and how long they are — and length matters, because contracts demand a minimum and short platforms turn long trains away. They wear out, and depots put them right.
Station access
The right to call somewhere. The whole map is open and drivable from the first minute — what you buy is permission to stop, which is the thing that opens up new work.
Drivers
Hired at a quality you can see: punctuality, smoothness, stopping accuracy, safety. You can train them up, at the cost of not having them for a while. Your first hire is what unlocks running a real operation.
An office
One, rented, and honestly it is just somewhere to be — a desk to sit at and a place to start from. You can move it. It buys you nothing but a base, which is the point.
Consequences
You can have a bad month. You cannot lose.
There is no borrowing, no bankruptcy and nothing ever gets repossessed. Overreach and your balance goes negative — at which point you simply cannot spend until you trade your way back out, on whatever poorly-paid work you can get. Everything the game does to you is a pause, never a loss.
The bet is that stopping someone growing is enough of a consequence, and that people would rather have a bad fortnight than lose a company they spent months on. That is one of the things I would most like to be wrong-footed on.
Where it is
Not a pitch for an idea — a pitch for a build
Everything on this page is built and played, not just designed. Signalling, junctions, interlocking, driving a train by hand and real SPADs; the job board, standing contracts, rostering, wear and depots, hiring and training drivers, per-station reputation, and a company that keeps earning and spending while you’re logged off — all of it runs today, end to end, on real test railways, backed by an automated test suite that pins down the bugs it already found along the way.
What’s still ahead is the multiplayer backend. Today the whole thing runs on one machine with one company — the economy already sits behind an interface built for exactly this swap, but the always-online service that gives every player their own company on a shared railway hasn’t been built yet. That’s the honest gap, and it’s why I still want your opinion before I build it.
The ask
What I’d genuinely like your opinion on
- Is the four-times trade a real choice? It plays the way it was meant to on my own runs — would you actually enjoy deciding between driving something yourself and handing it to someone worse at it, or would you just always do one of them?
- Does a shared railway without competition still feel multiplayer? Nobody takes your work or your money. Right now that’s untested with real players, because the backend that lets more than one company exist is the one big piece still ahead. Is sharing junctions and platforms enough on its own?
- Is “you can only stop growing” enough of a threat, or does a game like this need to be able to genuinely beat you?
- Real time, 1:1. A contract runs for a few actual days and the railway runs at 3am. Appealing, or annoying?
- There is no practice mode. Your first job is a real one, on gentle work with reduced penalties, and that’s the entire onboarding. Exciting, or off-putting?
- What is missing? The thing you expected to read here and didn’t.
Railmentum — a Playmentum game, built with s&box.
Most of this is playable today. Tell me where it doesn’t work.