From the first sketch to a detailed 3D layout with scenery, and everything in between.
Photo: Kabelleger, CC BY-SA 4.0, cropped
Drag track straight onto your virtual baseboard and click the pieces together. Move or turn whole sections, and bend flexible track exactly the way you want it. Context menus show you at a glance what you can do where you are.
Not merely a viewer that shows your design in perspective, but an editor built from the ground up for working in three dimensions. Rather work in 2D for a while? Switch back and forth whenever it suits you.
Design your dream layout with the track of your favourite make. Mix and match without limits: take the best turnouts from one brand and combine them with the finest flexible track from another, in one design.
Lay a photo or a drawing of a track plan on your table, or a blank white canvas, and draw on it: pencil, ink pen, fill, spray can and eraser, lines, rectangles and shapes. Move, turn and scale it to its real size against a ruler; it follows the landscape and is saved with your layout.
Finish your layout with mountains, buildings, roads, trees and grass, all of it rendered for real. You can even watch the trees and the grass move in the wind.
Mark a stretch of track as a bridge or a tunnel and TRAX builds the rest: the bridge with its spans, piers and abutments, the tunnel portals at every mouth, and the ground around them shaped to fit.
Choose a country and an era, and TRAX places the overhead line, the signals and the lineside boards in that railway's own style: masts and portals along the electrified track, a signal at every block, boards where they belong.
Let the computer check that your design adds up. Stop a big locomotive getting stuck in a tunnel later, or a curve being too tight. TRAX keeps an eye on whether your layout meets the main NEM and NMRA standards.
From your design TRAX makes a building plan to work from: the benchwork with every part to cut, the roadbed, the wiring, the blocks and the signals, with a parts list and the drawings to scale.
About the building planShow the world what you have built. Publish your track plan here on the platform, or use the free viewer to put your design straight on your own website.
The site, the editor, the manual and the building plan speak your language: English, Nederlands, Deutsch, Français, Italiano, Español, Polski, Čeština, Português, Magyar, 日本語.
Join thousands of fellow model railroaders. Find inspiration, trade ideas, give your opinion on each other's designs and ask for advice on the hard parts.
Your donations are what keep TRAX free for every model railroader, and they are what we depend on.
Support TRAX3DWhat do you need to build your ultimate dream layout? Say so in the forum's Ideas section and talk it over with fellow modellers.
Request a feature42 functions. Filter by what is new, what was already in TRAX2, or a part of the editor.
Drag a piece onto a free connection and it snaps into place, facing the right way.
More than a hundred libraries from over forty makers, with the manufacturers’ own dimensions.
Pieces from different makers join as long as the gauge is the same, H0m on TT track included.
Bend flex track freely by two handles, or lay a straight or a curve of a set radius and angle.
Single and double slips know which curves a train can take, and draw them.
Two tracks with a crossover each way, as one piece.
A turnout route can bend twice, as Peco’s curved turnouts do.
Turntables with their own number of connections, in 3D with bridge, pit and rim.
Set a piece’s height; the connected track follows within the maximum grade.
A locked piece keeps its height relative to its neighbours: a station goes up as one.
The padlock pins a connected run down, so it cannot be moved or turned by accident.
Mark track as tunnel or bridge; the landscape makes a hill or a valley for it.
When a library was corrected since the save, the editor says which pieces it affects.
Every piece has its own number in the status bar, to say exactly which piece you mean.
Drag corners, slide sides, add or remove corners, and put a table anywhere in 3D.
One button puts down a rectangular table of 2 by 1 metres.
Fits a table round the track that is already there, and warns where you cannot reach.
Tables at different heights, each with the track that belongs to it.
Seven brushes: raise, lower, smooth, flatten, trench, noise and slope.
Hills, valleys, cuttings and embankments round the track, from one number you can keep.
Nine layers of ground, laid by slope and height on their own, and paintable by hand.
Switched on, the ground adapts under track, roads and buildings.
Tufts of growth that move in the wind, each kind at its own height.
Draw a line and choose what it becomes; a retaining wall makes a real step in the ground.
Lakes, seas, rivers and canals with waves, current and bank protection.
Spray them in groups or place them one by one; every tree can be moved on its own afterwards.
Drag buildings from the catalogue onto the table, turn and scale them.
Stones, rubble, crates and barrels that settle to the slope.
A platform along the track at the right distance and height, with its edge and a ramp.
A clean drawing with track in its legend colour, article numbers and ink lines.
Lengths, angles, heights and labels in the drawing, in the colour you choose.
Every table side is measured in the drawing; double click to change the size.
A grid with a heavier line every metre, switched on and off.
Switch between a top view and looking round freely in 3D.
Sun and shadow, sky, textures and wind.
A figure of 1.75 metres with a ruler, at your layout’s scale.
Make the hills transparent to pick track in a tunnel.
Your layouts live on the server and you choose which ones to share in the showcase.
Every step can be undone and redone.
Import a TRAX2 plan file (.trx); it is converted to 3D, a drawn landscape included.
Send what happened in the editor with a support question, and see first what that is.
The editor and the site speak three languages.
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