Tuesday 25th September 2007:
Trainz Railways (the UK version of Trainz Classics) has been releasedand is now on sale either direct from Just Trains or from all major retailers such as Amazon.co.uk. Two routes are included in the latest version of Trainz, which are the Harlem Line and Metropolis City tram route, and the pack is the first in a series which Auran hope will bring "classic" routes and lomotives to users around the world.

Saturday 24th September 2005:
The UK version of Trainz Railway Simulator 2006 was released yesterday (it's listed as due for release on September 30th on Amazon, Play.com and GAME's websites) and arrived this morning! After a quick skim through the 82 page manual it looks as though there's some new features that I'll have to read up on before I try them out - the Content Manager being the most obvious difference!

Monday 22nd August 2005:
British publisher of Trainz, Just Trains, have announced that the UK version of TRS2006 is on track for a September release and have also revealed the eyecatchingly bright red coloured dvd case cover.

Saturday 18th June 2005:
Budget label Mastertronic have just released details of their July line-up of titles and it includes Trainz Railway Simulator for £9.99! A bargain price, which I reckon will appeal to gamers who maybe hadn't considered Trainz before.

Saturday 4th September 2004:
The new Passenger Edition of Trainz Railway Simulator arrived today, from UK publisher Just Trains. It's the same as TRS2004 but includes the Service Pack updates meaning that people buying TRS2004 at retail now will get both SP1's steam improvements, and SP2's passengers - I believe it's also got the tweaks which were included in the smaller and more recent SP3.

Thursday 8th April 2004:
Auran have relaxed the Beta Testers NDA on the SP2 of Trainz Railway Simulator 2004, just in time for the Easter Break, meaning that the first screenshots and specific details of some of the new features are now public - so here's a couple of work-in-progress screenshots for starters, and I'll hopefully post more over the next couple of days...

Monday 9th February 2004:
After nearly two weeks of countdown posts with puzzle pieces being made available on the Trainz website each day, Greg Lane from Auran has revealed his views on the Future of Trainz, which includes an Engineers Edition expansion pack for TRS2004, and two totally new products - one based on transportation and another designed to be a proper commercial-quality driving simulation called RailSimPro which is sounding absoloutely amazing with full online "real traffic" support and also a dispatcher mode which can allow for signal control remotely over the internet via TCP/IP.

It would appear that they are really aiming high with RSP and it looks like a very ambitious attempt at being THE rail simulator of all rail simulators, and possibly quite a bit more (there's talk of it being able to support cars and boats with road vehicles changing lanes as they would do in real life, instead of being fixed to a pre-defined point to point path). Read more about the announcement on the forum or over at GamesPaper

Also now a proper plan of what's ahead has been announced I feel that I can get on with building my route knowing that there's at least a couple of years of TRS left before the next version comes out - something which until today wasn't too clear and was making me put the development on the back-burner somewhat.

Tuesday 16th December 2003:
The first service pack for TRS2004 has been released, and is available for download from the official Trainz website, and is the "Steam Update" with a number of improvements to the way steam locomotives work such as better physics and new cab interiors for Mallard and Flying Scotsman. A number of other issues have also been fixed such as the problem where AI trains would always take the left hand route at a junction. Razorback Railway v5 is also available from the SP1 page as a special bonus content download.

Saturday 1st November 2003:
I've decided that I'm going to start developing the "East - West Cross City" route, which I was previously building for Microsoft Train Simulator, but gave up after finding that the route editor constantly wanted to crash on me!

The route will be built specially for TRS2004, utilising as many of the advanced features which are available, such as interactive industries. Cross City will be completely fictional, but based on a modern day UK urban setting, probably in the Midlands. I don't know when the route will be available, but more details will be posted here showing the progress.

Thursday 30th October 2003:
Early this morning a padderbag dropped through my letterbox from Cambridgeshire based Just Trains - the UK publisher of Trainz Railway Simulator. Inside was the very newly released (it's due in the shops from Friday 31st, and Just Trains only started to ship them yesterday) TRS2004, and the photo below shows both my copy sent directly from Auran, and the UK version side-by-side.

Differences between the two versions are that the UK version is "railway" instead of "railroad", the package artwork is different and features the Mallard on the front. The CD design features LNER gauges, and the manual is slightly thicker with more pages and the keycommands in the back two pages of the manual instead of only on the Technical Manual PDF as with the Australian version.

Saturday 25th October 2003:
Trainz Railway Simulator 2004 has just arrived! Direct from Auran in Australia, my copy of TRS2004 dropped through the letterbox this morning, and was promptly installed on my PC.

Below are a selection of screenshots that I took just after I'd installed it...

Buy Trainz Railway Simulator 2004 from Amazon.co.uk