Taking a trip to Tramau in City Transport Simulator: Tram

thesixthaxis.com:

Trams. The trains of the streets. Once a staple of British cities, first as horsedrawn trams and eventually electricity as the dominant power method, the rise of the motorcar and busses (and even trolley busses) saw basically all of our tram tracks ripped up by the 1960s. Now they’re oddities with limited routes in Croydon, Manchester, Nottingham, Edinburgh and a few other cities in the UK.

Over on the continent, though? Well, Vienna’s trams are iconic, and there’s large networks in Cologne, Berlin, Milan, Budapest and beyond that never went away, living alongside busses, metros and trains. They often have the best of all worlds, serving inner cities, having large raised platforms, and minimal air pollution.

So anyway, trams are pretty neat if you’re a public transport user, and the team at ViewApp agree. A few years on from the TramSim games, they’ve now released City Transport Simulator: Tram, bringing the game out of Steam Early Access this week.

I’ll be honest, the simulator craze has largely passed me by, but I’ve got childhood memories of catching trams in Vienna or Budapest on holiday, and there’s always a tram ride or two each year at Gamescom. but City Transport Simulator: Tram doesn’t take you to any of the real cities. Instead, there’s the German/Austrian-like fictional city of Tramau.

As the intro cinematic tells you, this city has always had plenty of trams, but as the years have gone by, the network has lost some of its vim and vigour. So the mayor has bought trams from all over the world to turn Tramau into the living tram museum of a tram-lover’s dreams.

The career mode gives you the whole network of trams to manage, with limited resources to start that you need to build up as you craft a hustling, bustling public transport network, customising the tram liveries along the way. You’ll obviously be able to drive the trams as well, like you’re a CEO on Undercover Boss or something.

But you don’t have to engage with that management side of things if you’d