This is the home of OpenBVE, a license-free, open source, free of charge train driving simulator.

Screenshots

This program includes detailed per-car simulation of the brake systems, friction, air resistance, toppling and more. In 3D cabs, the driving experience is augmented with forces that shake your simulated body upon acceleration and braking, as well as in curves. Besides that, OpenBVE features a 3D positional sound system best enjoyed with surround speakers, train exteriors and timetables for the current run. Finally, via the main menu, routes and trains be easily selected to start a new session, the controls can be configured to keyboard or joystick devices, and a variety of options can be selected.

Compared to other simulators of the genre, especially compared to commercial games, OpenBVE has its main focus on realism, not necessarily on user-friendliness. You should be willing to study operational manuals for the routes and trains you want to drive, and will in many cases not get along by just memorizing a few keystrokes. If you can identify with this focus, OpenBVE might be the right simulator for you.

Latest Stable Release:

1.11.1.3 Stable (2025-02-05)

Current News & Updates:

The OpenBVE Project

Significant Changes:

  • Fix: Improve several further issues with the new renderer, and make this slightly faster again.
  • Fix: Crash with a route containing a single station at which no trains were set to stop.
  • Fix: Issues where a TFO was not found in the expected directory could either crash or cause unexpected behaviour.
  • Fix: If a train contained mixed encodings, some could be read incorrectly.
  • Fix: Changing the game mode without starting a new game didn’t stick.
  • Change: Shift rails to a dictionary based accessor. This should make some NYCTA content which uses extremly high rail numbers work a lot better.
  • Change: Update pt-PT language file.
  • New: Allow train.ai to be used as an alternative for trains which are not intended to be drivable.
  • New: Allow the consist for TFOs to be reversed.
The OpenBVE Project

My apologies, another bugfix release, but an important one :(

Significant Changes:

  • Fix: Point / rail sounds not working correctly
The OpenBVE Project

This is a maintenence release, aimed at improving the performance of the new renderer introduced in OpenBVE 1.7.1.0.

In most cases, it should now be either considerably faster than the old renderer, or at most a little slower. Work is still ongoing in this regard, and there are hopefully more boosts in the pipeline.

It however introduces one new errata item concerning polygon lighting- https://github.com/leezer3/OpenBVE/wiki/Errata#lighting-behaviour-with-the-same-texture-defined-for-both-daytime-and-nighttime

The OpenBVE Project

This is another relatively major release, primarily implementing the first version of a new openGL 3.1 renderer.

Changes:

  • New (optional) openGL 3.1 renderer.
  • New: Improve the distance to next station display when the next station is not a stop.
  • Fix: A train.dat file edited with Excel would not be recognised.
  • Fix: Visibility broken for objects spanning more than one block in the reverse direction.

Update:

Mac download temporarily rolled back to 1.7.0.3 due to issues with the openGL context. Will push a fixed version as soon possible.

The OpenBVE Project

Version 1.7.0.3

Another small patch release (sorry!), updating one language file and the dependencies for the Debian package, solving an issue on systems which did not have mono-complete installed.

Please also note that this bumps the minimum Mono version required for Debian to 5.20- This is available in the current stable and newer by default. Alternatively, Mono provide their own repository for all currently supported Debian / Ubuntu versions.

Changes:

  • Update zh-CN language- Thanks zbx1425!
  • Update package dependancies for Debian.