Tutorial · Continental Freight Concession
Eurorails is a game of laying rail and running freight across Europe. You are a railway company with a treasury, a blank map and three waybills telling you what the continent wants moved. Track costs money; freight earns it back. This tutorial takes you from the setup screen to your first delivery.
Use Construction projects under Network planning on the right to save up to five city targets. Ordinary freight cities are eligible too. You may save targets immediately; lay an opening line before pricing or pinning.
From today’s network prices each target separately. After earlier projects assumes the preceding connections in the list are built. The ordered total counts shared new rail once. Move projects up or down to compare priorities; the estimate is not a proven minimum.
Pin project fits its route on the map and opens the Route planner. Pinning pauses the freight queue and replaces its map plan, while preserving queued jobs and pickups. Use Build for the quoted portion and continue in later turns. Follow queue resumes freight planning.
Completed projects remain until removed. Removing a pinned target clears the pin without removing rail. Clearing the plan keeps the saved list. Left-side information shows project status. Estimates refresh with network and event changes, reserve no track, and exclude future earnings, taxes, upgrades, debt repayment and the 220 cash required for victory. Turn budgets still apply.
Open Company performance under Network planning in the right sidebar, from Company office, or on the victory screen. Select a company and compare treasury, connected great cities, rail links or deliveries over time. Opening, completed-turn and victory checkpoints are saved, keeping the latest 80 per company. The live point includes transactions since the last checkpoint.
Use Current company comparison for standings at the same moment; historical records come from different companies' turns. The report separates operating earnings and costs from rail/train investment and financing. Cash after debt is a planning figure: you must still repay any bond to win.
Older saves have no invented history. Their next completed company turn records a checkpoint, and their existing accounts may cover an earlier period. Export report CSV downloads all retained records and current values for the selected company. Reports and exports do not change game state and never reveal private waybills, cargo or plans.
After adding jobs, use Review queue and compare orders in the right sidebar. It compares every order of up to three jobs, reusing projected track and consuming each aboard load once. Only the first projected delivery receives a current boom bonus. View details for pickup cities, rail costs, receipts and projected treasury. Browsing leaves the game unchanged.
Complete estimates rank first, followed by lower funding gap, higher receipts after rail and shorter approximate travel. The funding gap is the extra starting cash needed to buy rail before collecting these payments. A positive final treasury does not guarantee that you can fund every earlier step.
Full wagons or an unavailable construction route stop the forecast; partial totals cover only the steps estimated before the blocker. Try another order that delivers an aboard load first, or handle the cargo yourself. Estimates exclude rent, future events, replacement waybills, upgrades, debt repayment and turn limits. Distances are approximate; Station board provides current movement quotes. This is a comparison of job orders, not a guaranteed optimal circuit.
Apply jobs changes only queue order and saves it. Pickup choices remain attached. Active queues pin the new first job; paused queues preserve their independent plan. If the game changed, the review refreshes before you can apply an order. Keep current queue or Escape closes without changes.
Open Station board under Map controls during movement to compare cities your train can reach with its current movement and cash. Search for a city or goods, filter freight opportunities or stops with no new rent, and sort by freight, movement, new rent or name. Freight first is a useful ordering, not an optimized circuit. Delivery choices and the best single payment are alternatives, not combined income.
Choose Preview journey to fit a violet route on the map. The left Travel preview shows movement and treasury after arrival, new rental recipients, freight opportunities, intermediate cities and ferry warnings. Travel to on the right runs directly to the chosen city. Stop at an intermediate city separately to handle its freight. Loading and delivery remain manual. Use City report on the board for the matching waybills and supplies.
The game checks the quote again before moving; a changed route or price needs another confirmation. Successful travel updates the log and autosave. Cancel preview spends nothing and leaves the queue intact. Escape cancels a preview when no menu or inspection mode is open. Previews clear after a game action, phase change or save reload. Existing saves remain supported.
Inspect city makes map clicks read-only. Click a city marker to update its information, then use City report on the right. Inspection never buys rail or moves a train. Toggle it off or press Escape to return to play; the mode clears when your turn ends.
City reports list supplies, serving companies, new rail costs and matching waybill choices. During movement, reachable cities include movement and new rent quotes. Plan delivery pins a destination; Plan pickup fixes this city as the source. If the cargo is already aboard, your plan heads toward delivery. Prices and opportunities reflect current conditions, and alternatives on one waybill cannot be counted as combined income.
Expand Map overlays. Green circles mark producers for goods still missing from your wagons; amber diamonds mark your waybill destinations. These do not guarantee open or affordable routes. Emphasize my railway dims rivals without changing ownership or rent. City names offers automatic, all-city or great-city labeling; selected and planned stops stay labeled. This browser remembers display choices separately from exported game saves.
The left-side turn checklist highlights current opportunities and constraints. Review turn opens it with links to the relevant controls. Reviewing takes no actions and does not end the phase. You can still load and deliver with zero movement left.
The left information sidebar shows your company, cargo status, events, network progress, waybills, standings, city information and traffic log. The map stays in the center. The right controls sidebar contains city search, zoom, train focus, fullscreen, freight orders, cargo actions, planners, queue controls and turn buttons. Both sidebars scroll independently.
To plan a manual delivery, choose a waybill in Freight orders on the right and press Plan delivery. Add to queue uses that same selection. Deliveries available at your current city also appear as buttons here. On smaller screens, the map remains above Information and Controls tabs; select a tab to open that sidebar.
Delivery queue keeps up to three jobs, one choice from each waybill. Select an order on the right, then Add to queue; Freight advisor can also add jobs. The first queued job becomes the active plan. Reorder jobs with the arrows or Remove one. Map numbers mark their delivery cities.
An active queue opens its next job after a delivery. Fulfilling any alternative on a waybill retires that whole card's queued job; newly drawn cards are never added automatically. Loading, movement and delivery remain manual. Choosing a separate plan or network goal pauses the queue. Pause queue keeps the current job as an independent pin; Follow queue resumes from job one. The queue survives turns and saves.
Choose a different pickup compares producing cities using estimated new rail for the whole delivery and approximate travel. A selected producer stays fixed; automatic choice can be restored. Once cargo is aboard, the plan goes toward delivery. Rent, future events and turn limits are outside these estimates.
Cargo manifest groups identical loads and lists matching waybill destinations and payments. These are alternatives rather than income to add together. Plan delivery pins a choice and pauses the queue. Setting cargo down now asks for confirmation and warns about current delivery opportunities. It removes one load; the cargo is not stored at the station.
Company office shows your treasury, recorded deliveries, income, construction, upgrades, rent, taxes and debt. When an older game is opened, its accounts start from the current cash balance. Construction undo restores its costs.
Plan great-city connections compares the missing great cities once you have built your first line. Choose a city to pin a construction goal and build toward it over several turns. The completion estimate reuses proposed track, then adds 220 and outstanding debt to show the cash still needed. It is a greedy estimate at current prices, not a promise of the cheapest possible network.
Recovery bonds can be switched off at setup. When enabled, a company with less than 20 cash can issue one during building: receive 30 now, repay 40 in full during a later building action. Only one bond can be outstanding, and you cannot issue another in a round when you have already borrowed or repaid. There is no recurring interest. Debt must be cleared before you can win. Older saves without a bonds setting keep borrowing disabled.
Freight advisor ranks your current waybill choices using payment, new rail, approximate distance and cargo aboard. Select an option to pin it; each company keeps its own plan between turns and in saves.
During movement, the planner offers train placement, loading, a guided run, or delivery. The run button quotes movement points and rent. Cyan dashes show this turn's run, which stops at useful freight cities. Goods are loaded and delivered only when you choose those actions.
Useful cargo chips carry a check. A reminder appears before you end movement with a delivery available. Turn controls remain below the scrolling panel.
With two or more human companies, Private handoff hides the board between human turns until the next player chooses Ready. Disable it at setup for an open teaching game.
Choose a delivery in Freight orders on the right, then Plan delivery to find a pickup city and price connecting rail. Gold dashes show new construction; green marks pickup and gold marks delivery. The build button states how many links fit the current budget. Undo last build or U reverses the latest construction before another action or phase change.
Find a city centers the map and lists supplies. Train or T centers your locomotive. Objective badges show the seven cities you need. Save files exports or imports a portable JSON save, including legacy Ironway saves. Review an import before loading it. Every action is autosaved immediately.
| Action | Control |
|---|---|
| Pan the map | Drag with the mouse or one finger |
| Zoom | Wheel, pinch, the + and − buttons, or the + and − keys |
| Fit the whole map | The square button, or the 0 key |
| Price a route | Hover a milepost during the building phase |
| Lay that route | Click the milepost |
| Bring the train into service | Click one of your cities during movement |
| Run the train | Click any highlighted milepost |
| Load or set down goods | Click a goods chip under Cargo actions on the right; confirm to set down |
| Deliver | Click Deliver beside a highlighted waybill |
| End the phase or turn | The gold button, or Enter |
| Rules reference | The Rules button at the bottom of the right sidebar |
The map is a lattice of mileposts. Track runs from milepost to milepost, and what a link costs depends on the ground it crosses.
| On the map | Means | Cost to build across |
|---|---|---|
| Small dot | Plain | 1 |
| Ringed dot | Hill | 2 |
| Triangle | Mountain | 3 |
| Capped triangle | Alpine | 5 |
| Small red circle | Town | 3 |
| Red square | City | 4 |
| Red hexagon | Great city | 6 |
A link costs the average of the two mileposts it joins, rounded up. Crossing one of the great rivers adds 2. A sea crossing between two ferry ports costs 12 and is drawn as a dashed line.
The first two turns are survey turns: building only, with a budget of 40. Every turn after that has two phases, always in this order:
The gold button in the panel ends the current phase or turn; Enter does the same.
During a building phase, move the pointer over any milepost. The game draws the cheapest route to it from your network as a dashed line and shows the price in a chip beside the pointer. Click to lay the affordable part of that route; the log reports what was built.
Your train starts off the map. On your first movement phase, click a city on your own network to bring it into service there. From then on the mileposts you can reach this turn are circled in white; click one to run there. Hovering shows the distance and any rent.
Cities produce the goods their region really ships: wine at Bordeaux, steel in the Ruhr, timber at Bergen, olives at Athens. When your train is in a city, the goods it produces appear as chips under Cargo actions on the right. Click one to load it if a wagon is free.
Each waybill in hand lists three demands: a good, the city that wants it, and the fee. When you are in the right city carrying the right good, that line turns green — use a Deliver button under Freight orders or in the route planner on the right. The fee is banked at once, the waybill is discarded, and a new one is dealt.
Some cards in the deck are events, drawn when a waybill is replaced. A blizzard or fuel shortage slows every train for a round, a flood doubles river crossings, a dock strike closes the ferries, the revenue office taxes companies holding 150 or more, and a derailment empties your wagons where you stand. They appear in the traffic log in amber.
Instead of building, you may spend 20 on a works order: a faster train (14 mileposts), a larger one (3 loads), and then both. Buy capacity when you keep passing goods you cannot carry, and speed when the train spends whole turns in transit.
A company wins when the game checks these conditions and finds them true at once:
The panel shows every company's cash and great-city count, so you can always see how close a rival is.
There is no elimination and no bankruptcy. A company that overspends simply cannot build until freight income recovers, or use an eligible recovery bond if the option is enabled. The game ends the moment someone satisfies all victory conditions.
The game saves itself in this browser after every action. Reopen it and the setup screen offers Resume saved game. Starting a new game replaces the save, and completed games remain available until replaced. Nothing is stored anywhere but your own browser.