Railworks America

In short, I accidentally uninstalled TS without backing it up through Steam as part of a most unrelated process.

I have the folder containing the Railworks folder on a backup drive, and I don't have 22GB of data available to re download the entire program with the content I had. So the question is - is there a way to reinstall the game without re-downloading it?

So I currently have it running, with Steam active. But with the game seemingly uninstalled. Doesn't seem normal to me.

You are not very clear about what you might not have. If you still have the steamapps and common folder then just copy and paste your RailWorks folder into the common folder and you should be good to go. I would run a verify after I did this if this works.

I uninstalled Steam. So this included uninstalling TS. I forgot to do a backup of the program, but I did end up copying the folder to an external drive.

Now that I've reinstalled Steam, I copied the TS folder back to it's default location. But it doesn't show up in the list of installed games, because I am not willing to use 20+ GB of data to download it. But the surprising thing is that it still runs. Possibly because I logged into Steam, despite supposedly not having the game installed.

So in short -

Present in Steam folder - Yes
Steam running when game is launched - yes
Showing up in list of installed games in Steam - no
Does it run? - Yes
Achievements possible? - No, because Steam doesn't seem to recognise any part of it.

I hope this makes sense.

So I think if you do a verify Steam will discover that Railworks is indeed there and then it will be listed. Before you even do that have you exited both TS and Steam, re-booted your computer and started Steam again so see if it finds your TS? If you look in Steam\steam\games there should be something there that says TS is installed.

Or try this from Steam.

If you have the game data in the Steam apps folder, then you can force Steam to recognize the games by initiating the installation of the game.
Launch Steam and go to Games.
Select and click on install for the game that Steam has failed to recognize.
Steam will start to discover existing files for the game.