Whistle Stop

The bank has approved your charter. Try not to embarrass it.

You start with a loan, a woodcutters hut, and a camp of settlers who would very much like some firewood. Everything else is yours to build, one hexagon at a time: the track, the trains, the towns, and the industry that feeds them.

Whistle Stop is a railway logistics game about turning an empty frontier into a working economy. Lay track edge to edge, place stations where they earn their keep, sort the traffic with block and chain signals, and keep the goods moving. Deliver enough and a camp becomes a hamlet, then a village, then a town. Each one wants more than the last.

An economy that lives without you

Entrepreneurs open sawmills and brick kilns near your rails, hoping you will serve them. Serve them and they grow. Ignore them and they go quietly bankrupt, leaving a wreck on the hillside for the others to think about. Towns demand goods they have learned to expect. Surveyors mark deposits worth chasing. The frontier keeps unrolling as long as you keep earning.

• Endless map. The land expands as your railway does. There is always another valley worth a branch line.
  
• Supply chains. Wood becomes planks, clay becomes bricks, and fish becomes something that keeps through winter. Every facility keeps its own books.
  
• Real signalling. One-way blocks, chain signals through junctions, dual track where it pays. Your network is a puzzle you built yourself.
  
• The Ledger. Income by good, construction, rolling stock, upkeep and interest, filed by the year. The bank insists.

Co-op: one company, one money pool

Invite a friend from your Steam list and they drop straight into your world. No addresses, no port forwarding. You share a single company: one treasury, one railway, one credit rating. You will see their cursor, their half-built stations, and their pings when they find something worth your attention. When the money runs out, it runs out for everyone.

Bankruptcy is just more paperwork

Miss enough payments and the Providential Bank forecloses, files the outcome, and then, after a suitable pause, offers you a fresh charter. Your bankruptcies stay on record. So do your commendations.

Everything is a mod

Goods, facilities, resources, locomotives, town ladders, tiles, even the starting map: all of it is data that the base game happens to ship with. The in-game map editor and the modding tools are there from day one, so a total overhaul lives in a folder. You never have to fork the game.

Also included

• A guided tutorial that shows you the exact hex, and a game that explains why a placement is refused.
  
• Full controller support.
  
• Photo mode, because the 6:40 to Woodbarrow deserves a portrait.
  
• The Railway Gazette, reporting on your railway with the enthusiasm of a local paper with one reporter.