The timetable said July 24. For once, no delay.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4540370/Rail_Route__Expect_Delays/
Hey dispatchers,
Rail Route: Expect Delays is out now. After months of building, testing and one very lively public beta, the DLC is live on Steam, together with the free update 3.0 for everyone.
What is inside
The short version of everything the DLC adds:
- Infrastructure wear. Tracks, switches, signals and sensors wear down with use. Things get slower long before they break, and nothing ever traps your trains. Full story: Things Fall Apart (Slowly).
- The Service Locomotive and the Maintenance Depot. A yellow work train you drive like any other. It repairs what it passes over, and it couples to broken-down trains and tows them away. It lives in the Maintenance Depot, the new building for buying and stabling your fleet. Full story: Meet the Service Loco.
- Incidents. Breakdowns, storms, power outages, late arrivals. Every incident is visible, every incident is recoverable. Full story: What Actually Goes Wrong.
- The condition overlay. Press M and see the health of your whole network, green to red.
- Service route automation. Draw a maintenance route once, then a loco drives it on its own, on demand or on a schedule, repairing everything it passes.
- Operating hours. Named time windows for your contracts, so the commuter line runs only in the morning rush and the night freight only after dark.
- Construction takes time. Building and bulldozing are work now, with crews and progress you can watch. Expanding in rush hour is a plan, not a click. One checkbox turns it off if you prefer instant building.
Expect Delays works in Endless and Timetable modes on any map, and is fully compatible with Happy Passengers.
Free update 3.0, for everyone
The DLC does not travel alone. Update 3.0 is live for every dispatcher, DLC or not: waypoints to steer contracts down exactly the line you chose, and custom contract periods from 5 minutes up to 12 hours. The full tour is in Waypoints for Everyone, and the highlights are in the changelog below.
Thank you
This DLC started in your suggestions, on the forum and on Discord: maintenance, service trains, random failures, things going wrong. It was shaped by everyone who voted, argued in the threads, and then spent the beta weeks breaking it faster than we could patch it. This is your railway too. Thank you.
All aboard
Get Expect Delays on Steam. Things go wrong. You fix them. That is the real test of a dispatcher.
The bitrich team
Update 3.0 changelog highlights
The jump from 2.3 to 3.0 is the biggest update in Rail Route history. The highlights:
For everyone (base game, no DLC needed)
- Waypoints. New Tier 2 system upgrade. Place a marker on plain track, add it to a contract, and every service passes through it, without stopping. Named and colored.
- Custom contract period. New Tier 2 system upgrade. Set how often a repeating contract runs, from 5 minutes to 12 hours in 5 minute steps (hold Ctrl for 30 minute steps).
- Schedule preview. While planning a contract, station timelines now preview every repeat of the proposed service, so a wrong frequency is visible before you accept.
- Performance. A dedicated optimization pass for large saves: per-frame allocation hot spots removed, train simulation and UI rebuild costs cut.
With Expect Delays (DLC)
- Condition. Wear on tracks, switches, signals and sensors, with speed and switching penalties that grow before anything fails. Run-throughs damage switches. Timetable maps can start with pre-worn corridors.
- Maintenance Depot. Buy, stable and dispatch service locomotives. Sell locos for a full refund. In Timetable mode, service locos wait ready at your borders instead.
- Service Locomotive. Repairs infrastructure as it passes, rescues broken-down trains by coupling and towing. Full manual control from the bottom bar: go forward, reverse and continue, couple, detach, stop.
- Service route automation. The Service Automation upgrade lets a depot learn routes and run them on demand or on a schedule.
- Four incident types. Train breakdowns, storms, power outages, late arrivals. Each toggleable, each visible on the board with live countdowns, each recoverable.
- Operating hours. Up to 8 named time windows per game, assignable to contracts, editable on accepted contracts.
- Construction takes time. Building and bulldozing take in-game time, with visible progress. Toggleable per game.
- Seven new system upgrades across the maintenance and contract chains.
Full patch notes for the beta builds are on the Discord.
https://store.steampowered.com/app/4540370/Rail_Route__Expect_Delays/