TSW6 Rhine-Niers Railway: So much work really goes into a single route! Why construction is much more complex than many people think!

The route was originally announced during the Season of Reveals 2025 and connects Duisburg with Mönchengladbach. It combines typical elements of a German regional railway: larger cities, commuter traffic, industrial areas and open landscape sections. This exact mixture makes such routes interesting in a simulator – but also particularly complex to build.

A large part of the work initially goes into the scenery. This does not just mean landscape, but many individual components: modeling terrain, placing buildings and cities, creating vegetation along the route and, of course, building stations and infrastructure. According to the latest roadmap update from Dovetail Games, scenery and vegetation between Duisburg and Rheydt are already almost completely implemented. Internal quality checks are currently being carried out to ensure everything meets the desired standard. Especially in densely built areas, this step alone can take several months of development time.

Besides the landscape, there are even more complex areas: industrial facilities. These play a particularly important role around Duisburg. Industrial zones such as the Port of Duisburg (Duisport) consist of many tracks, shunting yards, large storage areas as well as industrial buildings and facilities. The development team is currently continuing work on exactly these areas, because these structures contain a particularly high number of details and track connections.

However, a route does not only consist of tracks and buildings. To make it truly feel alive in the game, it needs a complete timetable. This determines which trains are running, when they operate and which AI trains appear on the route. According to the roadmap, it has already been confirmed that the passenger timetable has been fully created, including AI traffic on the route. In addition, realistic freight traffic is planned to be added later, which should make the route feel even more alive.

The technical infrastructure is also part of the development. This includes signals, overhead lines, train protection systems and the complete route logic. According to the roadmap, the signalling is already fully implemented, including the German additional signals ZS2 and ZS3. The overhead line along the route is also almost completely finished. These systems must work precisely so that train operations in the simulator run realistically.

The roadmap update therefore shows very clearly: a route is not created in a single step. Several development areas run in parallel – building tracks and infrastructure, creating landscapes, integrating signals, developing timetables and finally testing everything. Only when all these individual parts work together can a route actually be released.

This is exactly why new routes often take longer than many players expect. A route consists of thousands of individual elements that all have to work together. From landscapes and signals to the timetable, everything is built and tested step by step. The Rhein-Niers railway currently shows very clearly just how complex the development of such a route really is.

Since when have you been following the development of the Rhein-Niers railway? Are you looking forward to this route in the simulator? Do you find regional routes or high-speed routes more exciting?