Hello everyone! Here is a small hotfix to our recent update.

- Market object rotation problem.

Stay tuned! :tv2conductor:

Hello friends! Here is our new update. Sorry for the delay. It means that we are first of all focused on implementing new mechanics and features for the full release. But we have prepared something for you as well:

- Debug mode is officially off! It means that now we can trace fewer bugs in logs (we hope that most of them are fixed already). The good thing here is that the game should work faster. Especially on macs. Let us know.
- The option that allows hiding of completed levels in the workshop list. Should help to find levels that have not been played yet.
- Anticheat. We have added some magic to make hi-scores tables more reliable. You can check your results and let us know.
- Arrow smile from the market object is removed.
- Added "Letters" objects to the workshop, that allows you to place custom messages as a part of the map. Please don't use bad words, we have kids and moderators playing the game :lunar2019laughingpig:.

Please let us know if you face any problems with this update. We are here to help as always.
Don't forget that we have a "Let's play together" challenge today after 1,5 hours!

Stay tuned! :tv2car::tvvagon::tv2loco:

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Hello friends! It's a new month and new race for a place on the cover of Train Valley Time. There are more and more game mechanics, the authors are finding new uses for old features and give us a fresh look at the game. Let's sum up the first week!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1666962362 A need has led man to dangerous lands. Previously, shamans called these rocks the Land of Grief, however, it didn't deter pirates from encroaching on the impressive treasure reserves. Nowadays, there are warehouses, markets and enterprises of heavy industry. It seems there is nothing mysterious if it were not for these trains with energy ... well, that's mystical. Leave them crashing on the rocks, better to attract investments to start production. Your trains will have to literally squeeze between sharp peaks and do not mistake the gates, or your trains will not be able to maneuver on a narrow path. Nice colors, an unusual way to supply electricity, and cool design ‒ @striker700 drive into the Featured on his steam cabrio!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1668061099 Today, the sponsor of relaxation for your eyes is @gemanera. The Fifty Rails of Gray map initially leads us into nostalgic melancholy with its restrained palette, colored groves, as if from different seasons, and slow trains, but it gets hotter over time. Moving up in a circle, we have to go through customs, and each of them has bizarre requests: one wants dynamite, others want ore, and the fourth needs books of all things. What would we do without markets? Get to the last city in 28 minutes and three stars will be yours! Of course, no accidents and wrong deliveries. And the work of the February winner @gemanera is traditionally sent to Featured.

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1669074561 This week's winner is Party at the Customs Post! @reg gives us all the railroads but leaves no money at all. It seems that everything is predetermined here, but no: you have a lot of opportunities to optimize traffic. The main obstacle is customs, but customs officers celebrate something, so they invite everyone to join them and don't want to work at all. We'll have to figure out how oncoming trains with workers will disperse with freight trains. Which market to build first? And who will make the rubber? An interesting quest and a beautiful picture bring @reg 10$ Steam gift card. Great job, congratulations!

That's all! Don't forget that your map besides of being featured can also become a “track” for our new “Let's play together” competitions. Create, share your results and join our cozy Discord server.

Stay tuned! :tv2conductor:

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Good day train lovers! In the last post in our series about the history of locomotives, we talked about the P36 and the DRB Class 41, two of the best-known machines from the last years of steam-powered engines. From a romantic point of view, those were the golden days of locomotion, when daring entrepreneurs and engineers crisscrossed the world with railroad networks and trains were symbols for freedom and progress. Trains needed to negotiate through difficult terrains with increasingly bigger loads, and at some point, engineers realized that steam locomotives had serious limitations in terms of power. As you know, a steam engine burns combustible (in the case of the locomotives, coal) in order to boil water so as to use the pressure caused by the steam to push pistons. In these engines, heat loss is a huge disadvantage that set serious limitations to their power. So they started working in internal combustion engines which, in its early versions, started using kerosene and gasoline as their fuel, until a nice gentleman called Rudolf Diesel patented his first compression ignition engine.
After some more iterations, these engines improved its performance and reduced its size and weight enough to be mounted in a locomotive. Technically speaking, “diesel” is not the right term for a type of fuel, but a kind of engine. Anything that can power a diesel engine is called diesel by extension, and funny enough, these prototypes didn’t run on petroleum-derived liquids but on peanut oil! Soon, the advantages of diesel engines started to become clear: they could be operated by just one person, where at least two were needed in the case of steam engines; a single crew could control many locomotives in a train, thus increasing dramatically its load capacity when needed. Diesel engines can be started and stopped almost instantly – which means shorter and easier stops with zero fuel cost and no cooldown times. They needed less maintenance, could work in freezing cold, were easier to repair… By 1925 there were already diesel locomotives implemented in the US, and they started spreading slowly to South America and Europe. The Second World War practically stopped the building and adoption of diesel engines, but when it passed, the whole world started enthusiastically adopting them. From the 70s onward, they became the new standard until the introduction of electric trains.
Today we’re going to start with one of the first post-Second World War diesel locomotives: the TE3 (ТЭ3 in Cyrillic alphabet), built in the USSR for the first time in 1953.

(Photo from Wikipedia)

During the Second World War, 70 RSD-1 diesel locomotives, designed by the American Locomotive Company, were shipped to the USSR to be used in ordinary line service. Also, these engines were shipped to Iran for use on the Trans-Iranian Railway. They were diesel-electric, that is, they burnt fuel to produce electricity, and that electricity, in turn, powered the traction motors. When the war ended the Soviets kept many of these engines, and Stalin ordered to reverse-engineer them to adapt them to the metric system and Soviet norms and regulations. Thus was born the TE1, which was pretty much a knockoff of the RSD-1; in 1953 they started prototyping the third iteration, and three years later the TE3 entered mass scale production.
The TE3 is a Co’Co’+Co’Co’ machine, which means (these wheel arrangement notations are crazy) that it had two units with two six-wheeled bogies (a chassis with a wheelset) with all axles powered, with a separate motor per unit. It’s a common enough wheel arrangement, most suited to heavy freight work because of its good traction. Let’s remember the harsh climate of the USSR, where ice and snow were not precisely uncommon – this locomotive surely made use of the traction provided by its extra wheels!
Its main weakness was its difficulty to work with variable loads, which lead to constant power cuts, as well as its tendency to overheating resulting in water losses from the cooling circuit. When this happened in water-deprived regions of the USSR, engine drivers were forced to use diesel as coolant… which, as you surely imagine, it’s a fire waiting to happen. In spite of this, the TE3 became rapidly popular, and in time it became the most widely spread locomotive in the USSR. Almost 6,800 were built until it went out of production in 1973.


Our in-game version is this locomotive with a similar sturdy and pragmatic design – a no-nonsense machine that will get you and your load there through snow, ice and sleet. The plow, as well as the frontal lights and lantern, will surely remind you of the TE3.

That’s all for today! In the next entry of this series, we’re traveling to the other side of the Iron Curtain to learn more about a couple of American and British diesel locomotives.

Hello everyone! Glad to meet you again! Congratulations with the end of winter! The first day of spring is the perfect time to recollect all the great workshop levels we have played in February and choose the best one. And the winner is:
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1640153191 It is one of the most beautiful levels of this winter. Tropical islands with azure water perfectly render the feeling of warm sand and taste of pina colada! And challenging task from radical environmentalists (do not destroy any object) makes this level a really interesting puzzle! Congratulations @gemanera with your well-deserved success! Thank you very much for all the levels you created for the last months. You brought so much fun to us and all the community! We are sending you a 20€ steam gift card and a special t-shirt from our friends at fretshirt. Congratulations! ːsteamhappyː:tvvagon::tv2car::tvloco:

Want to see your name on the next cover of Train Valley Time? It's absolutely real! Give your imagination a chance to be expressed! Open our level editor and play a bit. It's really fun! Jump in, we are waiting only for you! :tv2conductor:

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Hello friends! The news feed is full of photos of the happy winners of the Oscars, it's time for us to take stock of the past week.

The awards for "Landscape" and "Writing" go to Complementary Sides by @angryxpeh.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1661250995 This is a story about two rich cities, separated by a deep ragged gorge. Only one bridge can connect them, and the mayors want to hire you to build a universal railway network. In the beginning, you will have to inspect the main factories and then you will have to get raw materials for them. You will use all engineering solutions for laying the ways, and prepare your gear ‒ there will be many descents and ascents. This work definitely deserves a star on the Walk of Fame.

Today @gemanera becomes the best production designer with a picture Canal Frenzy.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1662344617 This is a colorful play about islands, which are linked to each other by a multitude of obligations. You will tangle this relationship even more. Don’t get lost in it! Shopaholics will especially like this map because you will spend a lot of money and do it often. Perhaps we should add an award for makeup, what do you think? Featured!

And the best map of this week is Reading on the Beach.
https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1659596802 After a heavy shift in the ice mines, you want to relax on a warm beach with your favorite book. However, you have to pay considerable duties to the customs, so they let the delivery to our library through. It seems that the customs officers with the merchants are clearly in collusion. We need to build many factories and entangle them with roads from all sides to finally break into the long-awaited vacation. @wantok gets a gold statuette 10$ for an interesting idea and the use of new objects. Congrats!

This ends our ceremony. We hope that each work of our authors inspires you to press the play green button of the level editor in the Workshop.
See you soon! Stay Tuned!

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Good day, friends, and welcome to our series of historical blogs about the history of locomotives! In the last post, we traveled to the Far East to discover the D51, a wonderful Japanese locomotive from what we call the Silver Steam Era. You can check the previous entries of this series here and here. Today, we go back to Europe to discover two very iconic locomotives from Germany and Russia and their in-game counterparts. Passengers aboard, we’re leaving the station!

Back in 1931, the Deutsche Reichsbahn-Gesellschaft (the German National Railway) started looking for a new, more powerful locomotive that could substitute the Prussian ones (like the P8 we already talked about), about to be withdrawn by then, as a fast goods train locomotive. They were looking for a 2-8-0 wheel configuration (two leading wheels, eight powered wheels) capable of moving around 18 tons of axle load. The German manufacturer of locomotives Berliner Maschinenbau offered them a different design, a 2-8-2, that could achieve that performance with more ease. The DRG approved it, and thus the DRB Class 41 was born.
Well, it wasn’t that easy, to be fair. It took them six years to come up with two working prototypes, and then a year of tests before it started full-scale production. These two prototypes were used to transport cattle trains to Berlin, and that got these engines the moniker of the Ochsenloks: the Oxen Locos. They were relatively cheap and easy to manufacture, thanks to the design principle of Einheitsdampflokomotive: a standardization process that started in the 20s when the newly-founded DRG decided to fix the mess that was its fleet, with more than 210 types of steam engines. If you ever struggle with Train Valley 2, just think of the engineers who had to manage that many trains!

(Photo from Wikipedia)

Thanks to this strive for standardization, every single locomotive manufacturer in German participated in building the DRB Class 41 – and that allowed them to manufacture a lot of engines comparatively fast. The start of the Second World War reduced the interest in fast goods train locomotives so much that by 1941 they stopped building them – but in those three years, 366 Class 41 were produced. After the war, two-thirds of these engines went to West Germany and one third to the East, with some odd ones sent to Poland, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR.


The in-game version of the Ochsenlok is easily recognizable for following the principles of the Einheitslokomotiven, with its iconic large Wagner smoke deflector, its black locomotive frame and red wheels, and long boiler with a short chimney. Looks powerful enough to take some cattle in record time to Berlin, right? It needs a name, mind you – send us your best ideas!

From Germany, we hop on a train (of course) on its way to the USSR during the 50s to discover the Soviet passenger steam locomotive class P36. The last mainline steam locomotive built in Russia, the General (a nickname that it got thanks to the gold stripe down its side which reminded of the decorations on a general’s shoulder) was a powerful 4-8-4: four leading wheels, eight powered and coupled driving wheels, and four trailing wheels.
By the early 40s the Soviet passenger fleet consisted mainly of engines of the class Su 2-6-2, designed two decades before, which were reliable but not powerful enough for long passenger trains. Then they were substituted by the class IS (named after Iosef Stalin), powerful but with a higher axle loading that made it incompatible with a lot of lines. When the Second World War ended and the Soviet economy recovered, the passenger traffic increased, which convinced the authorities that the USSR railroad network needed a new engine class for its passenger trains.

(Photo from Wikipedia)

After some different proposals, the first prototype of the P36 was built in 1950 and tested thoroughly at the outskirts of Moscow. The machine was powerful, fast, and efficient; after some more prototypes and a few tweaks, the P36 started its mass production… until, just three years later, the 20th Communist Party Congress decided to stop steam locomotive construction and switch for electric and diesel-electric locomotives. On June 29, 1956, a P36 with the serial number 10420 left the workshop with a sign written on its smokebox door: “1869 - 10420 - 1956 Last steam locomotive built by Kolomna Works”. It was the last steam locomotive built in the Soviet Union… but it would be in active service with stakhanovist determination until 1974.


And here’s our in-game version of the P36. You can see the iconic stripe, the red star on its front, and the red plow and wheels. Our locomotive is blue instead of green (we need to keep one color for all the locos in the generation), but it shows similar sleek and futuristic lines. This machine surely commands respect!
That’s all for today! See you soon in the next entry of our history of locomotives, where we will jump to a new era of the history of the railroad.

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Hello everyone! The end of winter is coming, and your warm summer maps make it feel even closer. A lot of markets have opened this week and we enjoyed visiting each of them. What’s in the shopping bag?

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1653777770 Sea, beach, shopping... on an island. But not all at once! We'll have to work hard to save up for the first bridge, and we need as many as four. You need to think about whether you need more trains early on. Shopping Island serves as the main road junction. The surrounding sea attracts the eye and makes you look into the dark, dark waves. Blue is so deep and mysterious that it seems as if there is one more sea underneath. Or so it is?
You have a little more than 10 minutes to get three stars, and @h2onik gets featured once more.


https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1654579187 There is only one city among snow and ice, the author asks to keep it warm and fed. And you should, because trains are in short supply, and people are freezing while looking at the cold blue ocean. There is only one market nearby, but it sells polymers. Some resources are being transported from the mainland, on rare patches of fertile soil, a snowman and a deer graze cattle. You'll have to deftly alternate the dispatch of workers and supply of resources. Can you run all winding roads in 27 minutes? Frosty map from @reg goes to featured!

https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1653368999 And the winner of this week is Around the Volcano. @gemanera leads us into the world of hardworking people who highly value their knowledge and labor. Two self-sufficient cities around the volcano require the very best and they don't stint on it. To live and work in this Atlantis of John Galt, you need to follow two simple rules: no crashes and no wrong deliveries. But that's not all! To exchange products, you need to deliver a special paper to customs. It’s rumored that at night they throw it into the volcano. Despite serious expenses, at the end of the race you will earn a large amount of money, and @gemanera gets a deserved 10€ on Steam.

It was a great week! We’re sure that soon we’ll see even more interesting works that use new mechanics.
Stay tuned! Choo-choo! :tv2car::tvvagon::tv2loco:

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Greetings friends! In the last couple of weeks we’ve talked about what we called the Golden Steam era: the years of expansion of the railroad when trains became not just a means of transportation but a symbol for progress, hope, and even freedom. Today we tackle the next period, and again we will talk about some of the historical inspirations for the locomotives you can find in Train Valley 2. This second generation of machines goes from 1920 to 1950. Since they were still powered by coal and steam, we will call it the Silver Steam era. Pack up and prepare for a long trip, because for the first locomotive we’ll talk about we have to cross the globe and travel to the Far East!

Let’s go to Japan! The Class D51 was a Japanese 2-8-2 locomotive: it had two leading wheels on one axle, then eight powered and two driving wheels in four different axles, and finally two trailing wheels in another axle. While usually the firebox (where locomotives burnt coal) was placed above the driving wheels, the 2-8-2 arrangement put it behind them, which allowed a larger firebox and therefore more power and higher speeds. This arrangement was first called “the Mikado” in the West after a previous Japanese locomotive (the Western nickname changed to “the MacArthur” during the World War II for obvious reasons).

(Photo from Wikipedia)

The Japanese railway system was built and operated by the imperial government with military and political ends, as a means to connect distant feudal communities in order to establish the central imperial power. Thus, it wasn’t only a means of transportation for goods and service: it was a political instrument and a symbol of power, a way to tell everyone that the Emperor authority reached the last corners of Japan. The Class D51 was built from 1936 to 1951, and it was designed by no other than Hideo Shima, a legendary engineer: he was the driving force and inspirator behind the creation of the first bullet train! Because of the war efforts, many parts that were meant to be built in steel were substituted by wood – but in spite of that, they kept circulating until 1975. They were almost exclusively deployed in Japan, although a small number of them deployed in Russia, Korea, and Taiwan were seized and used after the Japanese retreat at the end of World War II.



Train Valley 2’s in-game counterpart is this beauty. You can see the similarities in the front: the circular smoke box door, the lantern and a feedwater heater; after it comes the chimney, and finally the uninterrupted covering for the upper sand box, feedwater and steam dome. How would you call our first Eastern locomotive?

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Hello friends! The celebration of the Lunar New Year has ended. The Yellow Earthen Pig has finally come and we hope brought you a lot of steam coins! So while we are picking up the confetti, extinguishing the lanterns and hiding the dragon you can read a new issue of “Choo-Choo Weekly” about two great levels from our workshop! All aboard!

Do you want to visit a seaside? And what if it is the Amundsen sea? Dress warmer! We are going to the antarctic expedition with @Gemanera (a proven master of our workshop): https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1645784681 Among ice, penguins and fancy turquoise water you can find fast trains and a lot of industries. The map requires a lot of attention to railroad switches and the correct order of production. Take into account, if you want to get 5 stars demolishing of tracks and stopping of trains are strictly prohibited! One advice from our team: send all the resources to all the productions that require electricity and only then start the power station! Great job @Gemanera! 10 Eiffel Towers out of 10! Featured!

And the winner of the week is the level from maestro @h2onik called “Being Evil has a price”! https://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1649912413 What price will the city authorities pay for the deal with Him Who Must Not Be Named? As always… souls of the innocent people! Quite a creepy theme but just look at the design of the map! Isn’t it great? Color scheme perfectly renders the contrast between the green valley and the inferno world. And we only hope that these red rivers and lakes filled with lava… The puzzle is nice as well! The customer manager Charon lets the train go to the other side only with the soul contract! An interesting landscape with hidden ways will take some time but the level itself is fast and really fun to beat! Will you dare to challenge the Dark Lord? Congratulations @h2onik! Such a dramatic map! This week 10$ steam gift card goes to Poland!

That’s it for today! Hope to see more great levels with new Market production! And we're looking forward to see new names among workshop authors. Maybe it is you who will win the prize week prize? Jump in! :tv2car::tvvagon::tv2loco:

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