The complexity of the current code base of FreeRails is quite high. There are many classes and methods which are highly (sometimes cyclically) dependent on each other and often enough comments are missing. Additionally the game was thought to be a complex multi-player game with a server-client structure, with pathfinding for the trains, and complicated updates of the game world state (especially the trains).
That might be a part of the reason why development on FreeRails more or less stalled after 2005. It's very quite difficult to read this code and possibly extend or modify it.
On the other hand, the original makers used tests to continuously check their code and they wrote down their design ideas in a document. Also Java as a strongly typed language running on a standardized virtual machine, offers many tools to entangle such difficult to understand code bases without loosing the ability to execute the game.
That's why I could refactor the code base now for a week without loosing anything. Using static code analysis (code inspections in IntelliJ) and removing unused code, applying automatic fixes and manual improvements, replacing custom solutions by Java standards (which did not all exist in 2005 like Lambda functions in Java 8) I could reduce the number of code lines from 39k lines of code in version 0.4.1 to 33k lines of code now which means roughly 15% less code to understand. And as I said without loosing anything in functionality, the game looks and runs as before.
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