Welcome to the beginner’s guide to Pocket Trains! Pocket Trains is NimbleBit’s the follow up to Pocket Planes (which ironically, originally started development as Pocket Trains). You start off with just one train and a few train stations, but with enough dedication, you can create a train empire that spans across every continent. Read on for the beginner’s guide to Pocket Trains!
When you first start off, you will be at a train station with a train that is idled. From here, tap the Jobs button and you can see the available jobs, as well as your train’s route. Each of your trains will have one specific line color on the map, and any route that is your train’s route color will be transversable. Any route in white is unoccupied and can be purchased, and any route in a different color will belong to one of your other trains.
Look at the Jobs list, and you will see many available jobs to different cities. If the city shows up in your specified route color, then that means it will be immediately available to you. In white, and it’s not available to you; however, if you want to buy the route from the train that owns it, you can tap on that route and spend coins to buy it, as long as there’s not already another train on that same run.
You can take deliveries that are not on your route too, and drop them off at another city, in order to facilitate another train picking them up later on. Each station can hold up to 5 dropped off train cars – go to the “Station” button and you can upgrade the station to increase the maximum to 10.
Check out the Trains button to see the status of your train. You can change the train’s route color if you’d like, as well as add an engine or add a fuel car, if you have them. You can change the name of the train, swap out an engine with another available engine if you have one in your yard, or completely shut down the train altogether and stick it in your yard, which allows you to facilitate moving the train to another station (especially a station overseas).
Each train has a certain amount of fuel, and if you add a fuel tank to your train, you can double the amount of fuel that it has. If it runs out of fuel, then don’t worry, as you simply have to sit and wait around in order for it to come back.
Click here to go to part two of the Pocket Trains beginner’s guide!