This is the first of a weekly note on what changed. Things ship here most days, and until now the only way to notice was to spot a new line in the picker or find your leaderboard reset overnight. So: every Sunday, a short account of the week — what landed, what broke, and what a player caught us getting wrong.

Week of 17–24 August 2026.

Two private railways: the Keihan Main Line and the Keio Line

The Keihan Main Line landed on the 21st. Forty stations, 淀屋橋 to 三条, 49.3 km up the left bank of the Yodo River. It starts in Osaka's business district and it is filed under Kyoto anyway, because the last dozen stops are what anyone plays it for: 伏見稲荷, 東福寺, 七条, 清水五条, 祇園四条 — Fushimi's sake district and the Higashiyama temple front, one after another.

Its colour is the navy of Keihan's own KH station-numbering field, not the green the trains are actually painted. Colour-picking the rolling stock would have got that wrong; the numbering field is how the line signs itself on a map, and a map is what this game draws.

The Keio Line followed on the 24th. Thirty-two stations, 新宿 to 京王八王子, 37.9 km due west — underground out of Shinjuku, up onto the Setagaya viaducts, through Chōfu and across the Tama basin.

Its numbering skips KO02 and KO03, and that is correct rather than a gap. 初台 and 幡ヶ谷 had their platforms moved onto the Keio New Line when the corridor was quadruple-tracked, so no Keio Line train stops at either — local services included. They are not stations on this line, so they are not in it.

Both lines arrive with the full package: a synthesised station announcement for every new reading, a train portrait, and a line article in all five languages.

A typing bug the Keio Line dragged into the light

笹塚 is ささづか. The board printed SASAZUKA and the engine would only accept sasaduka, because づ had exactly one spelling in the romaji tokenizer. Typing what the board said was a mistake.

This was never a Keio problem. Fourteen readings already in the game carry づ — 根津, 国府津, 庚申塚, 小机, 真鶴, 稲田堤 — and every one of them is romanised zu on its own board. づ now accepts zu as well as du, with du still canonical so nothing on screen changes. It only widens what is accepted, so no score was invalidated.

The station you start at is now the first one you type

The week's largest change landed on the 18th and has a post of its own. The short version: a Yamanote lap is 31 station names now, not 30. You begin outside the ticket gate, and a pictogram figure runs onto the platform at exactly your typing speed while you type the name of the station you are standing in.

Every line's version moved for it, which means every leaderboard opened fresh.

Leaderboards after the reset

Emptying every board at once turned up three things.

The leaderboard card on the setup page read "no scores yet" on every line — a dead panel on the page people look at before every run. The full leaderboard page already showed the previous version's board underneath, collapsed and labelled as the old rules; the setup card was throwing that same data away. It renders it now, and both surfaces retire the archive together once the new board fills up.

The archive itself only looked one version back. The Marunouchi Line is on version 3: its v2 board is empty and its real history sits on v1, so the lines with the most history were exactly the ones offering nothing. It now walks back to the newest version anyone actually played.

And a live bug: the board cache moved to a new key prefix when the payload gained its archive field, but the two places that invalidate that cache kept the old prefix. Both had been deleting a key that does not exist. Invalidation was silently dead — a new score could sit behind a stale board, and a renamed player kept their old name on every leaderboard, until the 60-second TTL expired on its own.

The home page shows that someone is actually playing

Every number on the home page used to be derived from the static line registry. Impressive figures, all of them computed from a file.

There is now a Latest runs strip under the hero, looping the twenty newest finished runs site-wide, each card carrying that line's train and linking into its setup page. It lists signed-in players only — guest runs are never written to history — and the strip now says so, because otherwise finishing a run and not finding yourself on it is indistinguishable from a bug.

The featured-line grid below it turns over like a departure board: a sweep every five seconds, ten cards flipping 140 ms apart, each swapping its line at the edge-on midpoint of its own rotation, where there is nothing to see. Most of the registry passes through the grid now instead of the same curated ten. Hovering it, or tabbing into it, holds the board still; if you have asked your system for reduced motion, you keep the curated ten permanently.

A personal best now gets confetti

Two side cannons in the line's own colour — a Yamanote record showers green, a Marunouchi one red — fired on the same beat as the PB stamp in the result page's entrance animation, so the burst and the stamp land together. Three seconds, which is long for an entrance, but this only ever plays on a record.

Seven corrections, all of them from players

  • The Arakawa Line was numbered backwards. Toei has numbered the tram since November 2017, and SA01 is 三ノ輪橋, not 早稲田. Our own note in the data claimed no official numbering existed and that we had assigned our own; the premise was simply wrong. Both directions are still the same thirty names in the same keystrokes, so scores stayed comparable and the line was not reset.
  • 麹町 → 麴町. Tokyo Metro prints the old-form 麴. Shipping only that would have stranded kanji mode on IMEs that cannot reach the glyph, so both forms now complete the name.
  • 蘆原橋 for 芦原橋, the mirror case, from a second player. JR West's spelling really is 芦原橋 — but 蘆 is the printed 正字, and an IME will happily offer it. Kanji mode rejected it outright. The same one-line fix, which also covers 芦屋.
  • Nishi-fu → Nishifu. JR East romanises it unhyphenated: 西府 is a whole place name, from the former village of 西府村, not a directional prefix stuck on 府.
  • "The first 大手私鉄 in the game" was never true. Tokyo Metro has been the sixteenth 大手私鉄 since it was privatised in 2004, and its lines were here on day one. Reworded everywhere it appeared.
  • Three posts were quoting collection sizes that no longer matched. Fixed — and a test now pins the numbers that are meant to track the registry, while the dated announcements simply dropped theirs. A number that rots is worse than no number.

Corrections get read, and they get shipped. Send them here.

Removed: the retry hotkey

Gone end to end. The setup page was the only place the binding could be set, so deleting just the field would have left key listeners running on the game and result pages for anyone who had already bound one, with no interface left to change or clear it. Better to take the feature out than to ship an unreachable setting. Play again on the result page is untouched.

Rail Typing Pro: built, not on sale

A lot of the week's engineering went into a membership you cannot buy yet, and it is worth being plain about where it stands.

What is built: enhanced announcement controls, CSV export of your account's run history, a custom route workspace for planning journeys across several lines, and hosting rooms in the public battle lobby. What stays free is everything the game already was — every line, map, input mode and leaderboard, local records and account sync, the existing station announcements, and browsing and joining battle rooms without an account or a membership.

Checkout is deliberately closed. The pricing page is public because our payment provider reviews a live site before enabling an account, and it stays a read-only page until that review is finished. Pricing has the plans and the free/Pro boundary in full.

One related fix free players will notice immediately: the announcement studio on the setup page — an intro, two sliders and an upgrade button sitting between the audio toggles and the start button — is now a single closed row. "Tap to start" moved back up the page by about 300 px.

Next week

More 大手私鉄. Keio was the second of them; the rest are the plan.

See you next Sunday.