Controls

The shape of it

trainsworld is built around a map you drag and a dock you click. Most actions have three forms: a button in the dock, a keyboard shortcut, and — for the map itself — a mouse gesture. The game's built-in Controls panel (the ? in the interface) lists them live; this page is the same list with a little more explanation.

Map

Gesture	What it does
Drag	Pan the map
Right drag, or Ctrl + drag	Rotate the map
Scroll / pinch	Zoom
Shift + drag	Draw a box to select demand bubbles
Hold, then drag	Draw the selection box starting from a bubble
Shift + click	Add a bubble to the selection
Shift + drag over far bubbles	Explore the trips going to them

The bubble selection is how you interrogate demand: select a group of homes, then look at where those people are going. It is read-only — selecting bubbles never changes the game.

Building

Gesture	What it does
Click	Place a track point, or place the selected station
Shift + 1 … 7	Draw at level +3 down to −3 (flyovers and cuttings)
Double click track	Add a point to blueprint track
Backspace, right click	Undo the last piece of track
Double click, Enter	Stop drawing track, or finish a bus line
Caps Lock	Turn keep placing on or off
Delete	Remove selected track, stations and flyovers, or the picked blueprints

Track is always drawn as a blueprint first. A blueprint costs nothing until you press Construct blueprints, and it can be edited, disabled or removed piece by piece. That means a mistaken drag is cheap: undo it, or select it and delete it, before you ever pay for it.

Lines and routes

Gesture	What it does
Click a circle	Add or remove a stop on the selected line
Right click a circle	Loop the line back there
Drag a route point	Move it
Click a route point, then another	Delete it, or save the route at the last one
Enter	Finish the line

While editing stops, the map shows every station the line could stop at as a circle. The order you click is the order the trains run. A line that loops back on itself needs the loop point set explicitly — otherwise it is a there-and-back route.

Keys

Key	Action
Space	Pause or resume the clock
Ctrl / ⌘ + Z	Undo a blueprint edit
Ctrl / ⌘ + Y, or Ctrl+Shift+Z	Redo
Esc	Back out one step, then clear the selection
Delete / Backspace	Delete the selected track or station
Shift + click − / +	Step trains by 5
Ctrl + click − / +	Step trains by 20
Space (on the start screen)	Resume the last game

Panels

Panels are where most of the game actually happens. The repeated gestures:

Gesture	What it does
Double click a name	Rename it
Double click a list row	Find it on the map
Double click a fare node	Remove it
Hover the bar at the top	See how people travel, split by purpose

Dock tabs

The dock has five tabs, each with its own shortcut:

Tab	What it is for
Build	Track, stations, delete and select tools, plus the blueprint basket
Lines	Every line: its colour, stops, schedule and profit
Stations	Every station, its boardings and its upgrades
Finances	Fares, costs, cash, loans and the ledger
Cities	Transit share, trips and profit per city

Touch

On a touch screen the map gestures have direct equivalents: tap to place, drag to pan, two fingers to rotate and zoom, and a long press where the mouse would right-click. The dock buttons are the same. The game switches its own hint text between click and tap wording, so the panel always tells you which gesture applies.