Train Sim World 7

Release date: 15th September 2026

Genuinely my favourite edition yet! So much work has gone into bringing this game together & I couldn't be prouder of what we've managed to achieve!

I was pretty excited to take part in the Dovetail Direct this year! It was great to have the opportunity to sit down with Alex & the crew to talk about our recording trips & some of our favourite in-game details

What have I done?

Rail-singing... in core!

It's officially in the core game now! From the Great Western Express remaster showing it off, to the incredible community reception, the subsequent releases utilising it, then into the core game!

I've genuinely been wanting this since I discovered rail-singing was an unused feature in the game back when I joined Dovetail in 2023. So I'm super pumped that I was able to polish it up, push to get some fixes in for it and then get it approved as a core feature. It's essentially the same as the rail-singing the community has come to love from the Great Western Express Remaster, just with some little tweaks such as volume tweaks & better proximity fade transition at the front and rear of formations

Huge thanks to everyone in the community for their feedback on this. Your voices were heard and most certainly helped give the feature that extra push.

For the public editor folk out there, you can find the railsinging files in the core game as "DefaultTrackRailSinging". Assign the data asset to your track rules as the track sound asset

Miami

I had the pleasure of going on the recording trip to visit the Tri-rail depot in Hialeah Miami at the start of the year.
We were out there for 10 days, where we recorded absolutely everything we were able to. There were so many details we were able to record and document the functionality of.

GP49

Recording
Edits
Engine implementation
In-cab rattle system
Oversaw the creation of the HEP simulation component, providing the audio requirements
Reverser contactors logic
Air dryer logic

The in-cab rattle system adds in all of the rattles of the GP49 cab, as it was practically rattling itself apart when we recorded it!

While I was doing the edits; turning out recordings into loop, I noticed that I'd be losing out on an incredible amount of detail. As the cab would rattle the most as the engine transitioned between notches, before finding its rhythm and not rattling so much. There were also some notches that rattled so much during the loop, that it sounded weird having it just fade in out of nowhere.

So I decided to setup this little rattle system. It basically just tracks the RPM of the engine and triggers the corresponding rattle sound or transition for the notch the engine is going to or from.
It really makes the cab feel a whole lot more alive and immersive.

BL36PH

Recording
Edits
Engine implementation
Oversaw the creation of the HEP simulation component, providing the audio requirements
Reverser contactors logic
Air dryer logic

Good memories recording this one, the Dovetail direct had some great shots of me in action recording this beast. First was a shot of me recording the EBell & then a shot of me on the back, recording the HEP Exhaust

Here's the pics & vids featured in the Dovetail Direct!

Another cool feature of the GP49 & BL36 was that we recorded their engines in their loaded and unloaded states. This is essentially dependent of whether you've got the reverser in neutral or a set direction. But it completely changes the sound of the locos. So I edited both versions up and implemented them so the soundsets swap over as you change the reverser direction.

We now simulate the HEP, which was perfect timing as we got some incredible recordings of the HEPs on this trip. I worked closely with our loco setup team to outline the audio requirements for the HEP component, so that we'd have access to the events required to trigger our sounds correctly.

The GP49 & BL36PH HEPs both have idle and run states with transitions from start-idle, idle-run, run-idle, idle-off, run-off

I was also pretty proud of my reverser contactor logic. It was one of those things I wanted to do, that I thought would be dead simple. But as I started creating the logic for it, I kept realising all of times you could interrupt the sequence and it eventually ballooned into a vast tree of logic.

The reverser contactors are a relay sound that can be heard from the bottom of the back wall of the cab. When you change the direction on the reverser, a relay opens up, turns and then locks back into place. The driver opened it up so we could see it happening and record it. It was seriously cool!

Anyway, when you go into neutral, the relay opens. Changing direction then rotates the relay chamber, if you remain in that set direction, it closes the relay.

A nice little extra detail for this was that, thanks to the setup team for adding a save state for the reverser's last set direction, it's able to behave accurately after loading a save game. By this I mean, if you reverse and stop on a track, go into neutral and save the game. If you then load that save game up and set the reverser back into reverse, the contactors remember that they're already set in reverse, so you just hear them lock into place. If however, you decide to load in and set it to forward, the reverser remembers it was last in reverser and you'll therefore hear the contactors rotate, before then locking in. It's such a tiny and completely unnoticeable detail, but that's the sort of thing I love to do.

I enjoyed setting up the air dryer logic for these locos. It's always a bit of fun mapping out what each sound is and what specific thing triggers it. These sounds basically work in relation to the compressor, with unloader valves and air bursts following to purge any moisture from the system. It's another thing I'm really glad to have had enough time to get plenty of reference and variations to recreate it.

F40 & Rotem cab car

The F40 & Rotem cab car both have a new horn, as the engineers at the Tri-Rail depot were kind enough to give us access to everything they had there that week. Bonus!

Mic drop scenario

As the depot we recorded at was going to be represented in-game, I got in touch with the gameplay team with a suggestion for an audio scenario.

Once we'd gotten back from Miami, I put together a summary of everything we'd done and how we went about it; sending them pictures and descriptions of everything.

The overall scenario is a very brief glance into the audio work we did over those 10 days, boiled down into a much more digestible scenario.

Some members of our Beta team had been wanting a scenario like this for a while, so I thought this was a great opportunity!

Airedale

Such a cool route, incredibly beautiful with the TSW7 graphical improvements and so much fun to drive with the loco variety and network-style of the route

Class 333

General implementation
Traction motor synthesis, edits & implementation
Gearbox whine synthesis, edits & implementation
Announcement voiceline generation & implementation

The class 333 became my main focus after handing over the GP49 & BL36PH to a couple of my colleagues. It's always a pleasure to work on something within familiar territory.

Traction motor & gearbox whine synthesis

Working closely with some 3rd party TSW developers, I was taught some incredibly valuable editing techniques. I took these on and reshaped my editing process, then adapted what I'd been taught to align with my own implementation methods and shared my findings with the rest of the audio team.

I found it sped up my editing process, gave me higher quality edits and reduced the amount of audio channels being taken up by allowing me to group more frequencies into each sound file.

Door alarms & guard panel logic

Thanks to the beta team, I was able to get a rundown of how the door alarms and guard panels should behave depending on which panel's keyed in and if the reverser's in neutral.

If a guard panel is keyed in when the driver goes into neutral, an alarm will sound from the keyed in guard panel to let the guard know it's safe to open.
Opening the local door of a keyed in panel disables its alarm until you take the key out to close it and get the closing alarm.

Since we now have an AI conductor, I worked with the setup team to get a new event that uses the train's jumper cable system to let me trigger all guard buzzers in a formation from a single buzzer. Now pressing one buzzer in the formation, plays a buzz from all other buzzers. This was required for the AI conductor to be able to buzz the driver from a door panel.

TMS

Another thing I thought was cool is the implementation of the TMS (Train Management System). Jess from the setup team did an incredible job on the 333, and the TMS was one of those details I thought was really cool.

They gave me an audio event which I was able to use to trigger the TMS alarm that goes off whenever there's a train fault or emergency brake, as per the real system. I can't take credit for the system as I only had to assign a sound, but I wanted to mention it as I'd tied a sound to it and thought the overall system was really cool since it ties into the game's fault system.

Announcements

I'm very happy with how the onboard announcements turned out. I spent a fair bit of time generating the voice lines and perfecting the speaker processing effects to try and replicate the real sound as closely as possible to the reference I'd found.

Nuremburg

ICE4

EXT running edits & implementation
Bearing whine edits & implementation

BR440

Flange edits

There's plenty more in the pipeline to be excited about!

Stay up-to-date with the TSW socials! As I'll obviously only be updating this page once they've announced something there first...