Traincraft first came out in April of 2011.
At that time the mod was named “Train and Zeppelin mod” and only had one steam locomotive and one cart.
The locomotive had no GUI and you couldn’t attach the cart to the locomotive.
The first idea was to have a controllable powered minecart in which you could sit.
The mod got so much support that it was decided to continue the adventure, and over 80 more locomotives and carts were added.
As time went on Spitfire4466 and Mr. Brutal could no longer maintain the mod and updates stalled into 1.6.4.
About three years later they agreed to open it up for the community to maintain.

Now Traincraft has a regularly expanding number of trains and rollingstock, all made by both the new team and the community.
Three years more into development from a new team Spitfire came back to help add direction to development.

The maintainers aren’t the only thing that changed.
The notes left by Mr. Brutal and Spitfire said a rewrite would be needed to address a lot of issues, and that’s just what we did.
A new mod called Trains in Motion (TiM) was developed to simplify all the needed underworkings.
Traincraft releases have this mod inbuilt, so you don’t have to download two different mods!
Developing the core seperatley has allowed for far easier maintainability across many minecraft versions.
We hope it will also help across different modloaders, alongside everything from 1.7 to 1.17, and hopefully beyond.
One unfortunate exception is Bedrock, which we will be unable to support for the forseeable future due it it’s vast limits.

Traincraft always had a history of working with the community
But since opening full source to the community there has been a massive number of contributions, mostly for models.
To ensure everything looks and feels right we have a number of rules that content needs to abode by to get in.
With Traincraft-4.5 we intend to help groups that want to make content with their own unique styles, not just our own.
We intend to do this will full support for flans-esk add-ons.
We chose a flans-like style over more modern content packs because the flans style is actually a mod itself.
On the front that makes it seem more difficult, and admittedly it is to some small extent.
But it removes all limits for content creators, allowing not just custom trains and stock, but everything from custom blocks to tracks and entity logic.
Over time we intend to write new ways for features to be interacted with, both to add new functionality, and further simplify them for users with no experience.

We will be adding many new features to set the groundwork for many years to come.
New rails with support for vanilla and Track API, while still keeping TC’s iconic puzzle-piece design, with all the old shapes, and some new ones.
Trains are finally getting the attention they deserve, we’ll be adding in animations, dynamic lighting and model fixes.
We’re taking the extra time to be sure, even with all the new features, the mod will run better on weaker computers and weaker internet connections.
However one thing we don’t wanna change is the core gameplay. TC was always a very unique mod, even with 4+ other active train mods, it’s still unique,
We believe that’s one of the many things that makes it strong.
No matter how much gets changed or added we want to be sure you can pick it up, and it still feels like Traincraft.