Trainz - PC

My 12 year old train loving son is enjoying this PC game. It is realistic and fun. It is worth every penny. I am glad we purchased this one for his birthday.

While it's possible to fire up this sim and just operate the trains on the 3 tracks that are included, the real fun lies in building your own scenery and tracks with the very powerful editing tools. You can create huge beautiful landcapes and tracks (hundreds of miles of track lengths are possible if you've got the time). The editor is extremely well-designed and intuitive--one of the best editors of any types I've ever seen. It comes with a good paper manual, however I was creating beautiful tracks without even giving it a glance. Only when I got into the more involved aspects did I take a few peeks at the book. The Auran website also has some great user-created tracks you can easily download and run. Most are around 3 to 5 megs in size. Bridges, tunnels, inclined tracks, hook tracks together for complex layouts--pretty much whatever you can imagine is possible to do here. Rolling hills or jagged mountain peaks; all are easily created. Cities complete with roads and moving traffic, or country towns with farm animals. The learning curve is gentle, yet its power is great. You'll likely spoend a couple of hours playing around and getting the basics down. And from then on, be prepared to lose a good chunk of your life to this.As far as actually driving the trains, you can choose either a simple mode or a complex and highly realistic mode. You can do a first-person view from inside the engine, or a following mode or a system that views your train from various cameras that you place while building your tracks. All views are fully customizable. I highly recommend this for anyone who has any kind of interest in trains.

It's an alright program, for train lay out buffs. But if you want the real deal, like slowing down the flying scotsman before entering a station, real physics, and real routes. Then I suggest you go with MSTS, and ignore this simple program. There are hundreds of sites to download hundreds of new engines and routes, they only downside is that you have to create a consist for each new engine and car, but they have helpful tutorials to help you out, so I give this, 2 stars. Because of the simple control design. But, MSTS simulates the real thing, REAL engine controls, that need YOUR constent monitering. I'll probly get hateful reviews now.

The Trainz program is the easiest way to enjoy model railroading I can think of. The operation is realistic, the program is very flexible and can be adapted to your needs easily. You can add on to existing layouts, create your own layout, create locomotives and rolling stock, and generally have a nice model railroad without all the usual problems of wiring, scenery, and so on that is attendant with constructing a layout. The whole model train system is contained within your pc - and best of all, you can take it with you on a laptop pc!

so i used to think railroad tycoon 2 was like the best game ever. so much fun, so easy.. but i was absolutly blown away by trainz. this game is awsome. it puts railroad tycoon and ms train sim to shame. the only complaint i have is that the game has a very steep learning curve. especially in surveyer mode. but once you get the hang of it, its really really easy to play and design your own worlds.