Sidetrack: tiny trains for your desktop, a cozy idle railway game

Run the railway

• Idle at your own pace. Stations make cargo and your trains carry it for coins. Blow a train’s whistle for extra coins, send it off as an express for double pay, or just let it all run.
• Buy and build. Wagons for every cargo, steam, diesel and electric engines, faster track, more trains, longer platforms and station lights for the night shift.
• Five districts on one long line. The Countryside, the Harbour and its tides, the steep Mountain, the electric-only City and the endless Grand Terminus, each with a chain of contracts that opens the next.
• The Museum. Retire a finished district for tokens, perks, liveries and decorations, then run it again, on a charter for a medal if you like.
• Offline progress. Close the game and come back up to 16 hours later (72 with Museum perks) to what your trains earned.
• Focus blocks. Set a 15 to 90 minute block, get on with your work, and a bonus express rolls through town when it ends.

Live in the town

• A town that grows with your line. New stations and contracts bring new buildings, people and cars, and vans take your deliveries to the shops that want them.
• Sixteen regulars. They ask for deliveries and favours, and some keep a shop you can look inside.
• Things to find. Sixteen rare trains, a missing cat on the rooftops, lost property, visitors for the guest book and a photo album of the town to fill.
• Make it yours. Name and paint your trains, ride along to fill a stamp book, fund town projects and place forty decorations wherever you like.
• Day and night. Windows light up at dusk, the trains run with headlights, fireflies drift over the river, and now and then it rains.

Sidetrack · The bakery

Made for your desktop

• Choose the monitor, the edge, the height and the scale, and keep the strip on top or let other windows cover it.
• Night watch: step away and it parks the line for the night, then pays you for the time.
• 78 Steam achievements, a radio with each district’s music, and a guide behind its own button.
• No microtransactions and no DLC.

New in 1.0.2

• Zoom in and out with the bar’s − and + buttons, Ctrl + mouse wheel, or the - and = keys. The strip keeps its size.
• A map of the whole line with its stations, waiting goods and trains. Click a station to go there.
• The strip’s height can be changed right on the bar, which now sits just above the strip instead of over the town.
• Game menus can be moved by their title and resized by their edges, and a retired district gets new contracts each time you run it again.

Requirements and platform notes

• Windows 10 or 11. A dual-core 2 GHz processor, 4 GB of RAM, any graphics card with OpenGL 3.3, and 250 MB of disk.
• SteamOS and Linux: a native build with the same requirements. It needs an X11 desktop or XWayland. On SteamOS, use Desktop Mode.
• Saves live in the game’s own folder (Settings has an “Open save folder” button), and the game keeps earlier copies you can go back to (Settings > Earlier saves). Postcards you keep from the photo album are saved to a Sidetrack folder in your Pictures.
• Credits: made with Godot Engine; pixel art by GuttyKreum (The Japan Collection); music by AlkaKrab. The full list is in the game.

Questions people ask before buying