Thousands of locomotives, cars, and routes were available for free (and pay). You could run a train with all of the controls and features, view it from the outside, and run over vast distances from one edge of a route to another. When it was introduced in 2001, the world MSTS created was revolutionary. The mainstream granddaddy: Microsoft Train Simulator (MSTS)/Open Rails (OR):.With that in mind, let's review some of the most popular train simulators and my thoughts on them. No, that will not help its case in review-time. For the sake of fairness, I am only grading based on original developer content, and NOT on 3rd party content. While reviewing, I'm looking for several things: PHYSICS (how well the train handles compared to life), GRAPHICS (how good the simulation looks), SOUND (how good and accurate the sound quality is), AMBIENCE (the ability to make you believe you are in the simulation), and ACCURACY (how much attention is paid to the little details, like angle cocks and gen.
Those of you who can parse this information might be led to believe that I prefer accuracy, realism, and North American switching in the modern age. My background is that I am from the US, was born in the early 1990's (yes, part of that generation), an ex-conductor from a short line railroad, and have been an occasional engineer on some EMD locomotive types (SW1200, SW1500, GP8, GP40, SD40-2). When checking out people's opinions, it helps to know of their backgrounds and biases. If you don't like my opinions, that's your opinion. This may not be enjoyable.Įveryone has an opinion. Alright, I've heard a lot of different questions and opinions as to which simulator is best, so I thought I'd weigh in.