Railsimroutes.net

Homepage of The openBVE Project, a licence free, open source, internationally aware, cross-platform train simulator which includes numerous new features and capabilities allowing for a greater focus on realism, a more immersive driving experience, and more engaging route environments. openBVE can also load legacy add-ons designed for BVE Trainsim. Originally developed by michelle and odakyufan, the project is now maintained by Chris Lees. The program has been written using .NET (with C# source code freely available), OpenGL, OpenAL and lately openTK, enabling openBVE to run on Windows, Linux and macOS.

openBVE offers full 3D cabs with driver's head/body model, animated object capabilities, new camera views, lighting capabilities, faster rendering, and excellent physics and systems modelling. Developer tools, such as Route Viewer, Object Viewer, Object Bender and Train Editor are also available, along with resources for plugin developers who wish to create cross-platform .NET assemblies for use with openBVE trains.

Extensive documentation for developers is provided.

Mackoy's BVE Trainsim website, where you can download BVE v5 (or the older v4 and v2), and supporting utilities. BVE v5 supports a continuous curve coordinate system, horizontal and vertical transition curves, rheostatic braking, moving passing trains, and head motion. You can read mackoy's blog for updates and news.

Jeminie Inreractive's Hmmsim mobile app, which can load converted BVE and openBVE content for use on your iOS or Android smartphone.

International openBVE/BVE resource and forums, and portal containing information, articles and links. Also hosts the openBVE Project development forum.

A wide variety of busy forums are available, including a forum for BVE and openBVE.

U.S. based openBVE/BVE community site and forums, with a portal containing downloads.

A wide variety of busy forums are available, including a forum for BVE and openBVE.

A discussion board with various sections dedicated to UK rail, along with a simulation section.

A forum for Italian railsim users, including sections for openBVE and BVE. [Italian Language].

A forum and site for Spanish and Latin American freeware railsim add-ons, including a section for BVE/openBVE. [Spanish Language].

The active forum hosted at sgTrains for the Singapore openBVE community. [English Language].

Chris Lees' openBVE site, including the Plymouth-St Austell, Somerset and Dorset and Clarendon routes, as well as German routes such as Linie 10. A selection trains are available, along with Mechanik resources, blog, and route building tutorial. You can also find objects, utilities, and the BVEC_ATS .NET plugin here too.

Dexter's website, where you can find routes, trains, objects, development guides and utilities. You can Find First Brno Track, along with Odakyufan's Chashinai Railway network for openBVE here.

An excellent tutorial for anyone interested in developing trains for BVE.

Graymac's openBVE site focused on Irish and Welsh routes and trains, and home to the classic Ballyfeckin railway and the new Portarlington route.

Ben Leahy's new site where you can download the class 350 EMU with 3D cab, which will be used with Watford Junction to Rugby when it's released.

Steve Thomas' site where you can download various trains, including those with exterior car objects designed for openBVE. Keep an eye out for the soon to be released Network West Midlands route.

The BVE Western Region website, where you can find the Central, Jubilee, Waterloo and City and other in-development routes for openBVE.

Visit Don Clarke's site, to download the scenic Bo'ness Branchline and the superb Edinburgh to Dundee route, which comes complete with excellent scenery, and detailed civil engineering features such as the Forth Rail Bridge and Tay Bridge!

Sacha Dodd's website, where you can download his well known routes, including Bay Park and the LUL Victoria Line.

Visit this site to download the Asford to St. Mary Cray section of the Ashford to London victoria (via Maidstone) route for BVE. There are some wonderful screenshots of the route on the site as well.

Luigi Cartello's excellent site for Italian BVE fans; regularly updated, home to some stunning Italian routes, and the place to visit for Italian speakers wishing to get started with BVE. [Mainly Italian Language]

Roberto Benini's site, where you can download the superb FEVF Ora-Predazzo route for openBVE or BVE4. The route features some beautiful scenery, detailed objects and overhead line equipment, and in openBVE, the train features excellent exterior car objects and car interiors, as well as a superb 3D animated cab. [Multilingual]

On this site, you can find some superb add-ons, including the stunning new Genova Brignole - Recco route project for openBVE, as well as the FGC Ferrovia Genova Casella route, and Biella Oropa route. [Italian and English Language]

On this site, you can find three fine Budapest Metro Lines; the Budapest Underground, and Metro Lines 2 and 3. A selection of trains including some very nice openBVE exterior car objects is also available for download. [English and Magyar]

On Zaigron's site, you can find the very nice Szigetújfalu tram route, featuring suburban and rural areas, plenty of road vehicles, and a good depiction of overhead line equipment. The route is also fully openBVE compatible. [Hungarian]

An excellent Hungarian BVE site, with route and train downloads, an object collection, gallery, forum, and more. [English and Magyar]

In the BVE section of this site, you can find two gems for openBVE or BVE: the Tokyo Metro Hanzomon and Ginza Lines. Both routes feature some excellent in-tunnel lighting effects, superb atmospheric sounds, and the TRTA trains feature some sophisticated, innovative functionality and ATC simulation thanks to their plugins. [Japanese]

On this site, you can find the Saijou Line for openBVE, which includes some impressive night lighting effects, lovely atmosphere and demonstrations of animated objects, along with the Tozai Line, which includes a rather nice underground section, with excellent in-tunnel lighting effects and stations. The Local BVE Blog is also well worth a visit, where you'll find articles covering the use of openBVE's new features and commands, with some screenshots. [Japanese]

Excellent site with a range of Japanese trains available to download. [Japanese]

Vern Moorhouse's UK transport simulation site, with news and reviews covering many kinds of transport simulations.

Geoff Mayo's website, where you can download his range of excellent SimSig Integrated Electronic Control Centres (IECC) simulations.

A fantastic new simulation currently being developed in the Netherlands; visit the forum to see screenshots of this promising simulator.

An excellent German rail sim with many realistic features, including cab systems modelling, signalling, and superelevation.

A very nice German cab-view simulator, with smooth graphics, cab sway, realistic cab systems, good scenery and realistic catenary.

Mark Goodspeed's evolving railway simulator, which includes a range of features such as realistic UK signalling and useable NX/lever frame panels, realistic OHLE geometry, animated 3D models, and more.

RailServe.com directory: Railroad Travel, Hobby and Industry.

iRail Railway Search Engine.

Andy Slater's excellent website with numerous high quality sound samples of UK diesel loco classes, as well as class and cab photographs. These files are copyrighted - anyone wishing to use any of these files in BVE trains should seek permission first.

Fascinating site by Andy Doherty, containing information and photographs covering the many railways and stations around the Birmingham area. I recommend the site to users of my Birmingham Cross-City South openBVE route, as you can find out about the history of the line's closed and operational stations.

An excellent site explaining the meaning of a wide range of lineside signs and signalling. Users of my own BVE routes might like to refer to this site, along with the Lineside Signs section of my own openBVE Driver's Guide.

A feature-rich open source code editor which I use for openBVE add-on development, HTML, PHP and other text-editing tasks. The utility supports several languages, and is compatible with Windows platforms.

A handy text editor I use for coding openBVE objects and route files, with a useful file comparison feature.

My current web browser of choice on Windows.

I carry out image editing with Photoshop, video editing with Premiere Pro, audio editing with Audtion and there are many more creative applications available.

GNU Image Manipulation Program, a great free and open source cross-platform image editor.

Handy and easy to use audio editing software used for editing sounds in Railsimroutes.net projects.

Great free and open source audio editing software.

The IDE (Integrated Development Environment) I use for writing C# applciations and working with the UKTrainSys .NET plugin. The Community edition is free to donwload.

An open source C# IDE (integrated development environment) for Windows platforms.

A fantastic open source, cross-platform x86 and AMD64/Intel64 virtualization project, which I use for quickly testing different operating systems within my usual chosen OS environment, and for keeping favourite old software alive. Great for testing openBVE under Linux as well, as VirtualBox supports hardware acceleration via OpenGL.

I use VMWare Workstation Pro 15 on Windows, and VMWare Fusion 10 Pro on macOS, for virtualisation including keeping old operating systems alive such as MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1(1), Windows 95, 98, ME, etc.

Excellent Commodore Amiga emulator which I use for reliving the Amiga Workbench days.

Cloanto's Amiga Forever includes WinUAE as well as Amiga Kickstart ROMs.

Excellent DOS emulator which I use to keep old MS-DOS games alive, and also for Windows 3.1(1) emulation.

Superb front end for DOSBox on macOS which I use to keep old MS-DOS games alive, and also for Windows 3.1(1) emulation.

A free open source 3D content creation suite, available for all major operating systems.

An excellent free and open source FTP solution, for Windows, Linux and macOS. I use this tool for most FTP related tasks where my websites are concerned.

Server and cloud storage browser which is used for FTP transfers over VPN to the rackserver when remotely working on development websites.

Useful image processing utility especially handy for batch processing of files, creation of thumbnails, and so-on.

The homepage of Daniel Beardsmore, where you can find several handy utilities, including Batch-RegEx, which I'll be using in the course of developing my Watford Junction to Rugby route.

Handy Windows 10 tweaking utility for customising and controlling Windows 10 behaviour.

Superb dock and desktop icon organiser for macOS (but 32-bit only).

Disk benchmarking tool for macOS.

Handy customisable and attractive system monitor which lives in macOS' menu bar, with a sidebar widget available.

Stardock's Fences application for organising icons on the Windows Desktop, and WindowBlinds for making Windows 10 look a little more refined, amongst other customisation tools.

I use CPU-Z for gathering information about my PC hardware, and HWMonitor for monitoring temperatures, voltages, etc.

I also use GPU-Z for gathering information about graphics cards (GPUs).

Useful utility for gathering information about storage devices installed in your system, including HDD and SSD SMART status.

Great tool for finding large files or groups of files on your drives, presented graphically and making freeing up disk space much easier.

Mark Russinovich's collection of Sysinternals tools now hosted by Microsoft, with useful programs such as Process Explorer, Process Monitor and TCP View amongst many others.

Cross-platform in-depth network protocol analyser.

An easy way to install Apache, PHP/PHPMyAdmin and MySQL on Windows. This is an open source project, which I've found helpful and convenient for web development before building my own server.

Tracker software used to compose the music to my YouTube videos.

A cross-platform Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) using the Tracker-based approach, which I'm currently learning to use.

Useful free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework.

A great open source video capture/processing utility which I use for encoding my videos prior to uploading them to YouTube. Compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit Windows platforms.

Virtual 3D globe software originally based on Keyhole's EarthViewer, and invaluable for openBVE route development.

Excellent cross-platform 3D space (as in known universe!) visualisation software.

Excellent open source planetarium software.