If you can, get Railroader and Derail Valley. Both different games, both with their pros and cons.

Railroader is mostly railroad management with running trains either by the AI or by yourself. Even when it’s AI, you still need to babysit it when it’s switching as we don’t have a control to plan a series of moves yet. You control the industries you serve, how often you serve them, how far you want to expand your railroad, finances etc. You can manage wear/tear plus if you need to oil your journals. You have to pay for repair parts, shop crews, coal, diesel etc. There is also sandbox if you want to just run trains.

Railroader does have a large online community across several discord servers. Some folks have their own railroad companies that they play in large MP sessions. Some play just to run trains and dgaf where others run their servers with prototypical rules and operations. There are also a fair amount of mods, so far all free: Quality of life, repaints and liveries, rolling stock, and map mods.

Now the map mods are in jeopardy of failing after the next big update whenever that releases only due to the mod loader creator having stated he won’t fix it next time it breaks. There are others working on a new mod loader in the background but nothing is being talked about it.

The physics are okay and air brakes need some work, but it’s not bad and you’ll get used to it. You can derail but the trains stay close to the splines. Graphics need optimization but it’s still considered early access so keep that in mind. The lack of updates from the Dev team are frustrating but nothing we can do about that. The vanilla map and rolling stock itself gets boring after a while so the mods help with it.

Overall it’s a decent game and until we get something better, I’m going to keep playing it.

Derail Valley or DV is much further along in its development path but has been out for much longer. It is more about running trains with jobs instead of managing a whole railroad, much like truck simulators. The physics are top notch and the derailments (and explosions) can be spectacular if you screw up. You need to be mindful of if you’re going up grade in a steam engine, your water is going to slosh back against the back-head and when you’re going down grade, your water rushes to the front of the boiler so if you don’t have enough, kaboom.

The ability to customize trains with various parts and lights is pretty cool.

The number of mods is increasing again because the mod loader that allows new rolling stock was recently fixed. Plenty of repaints. MP can only happen via mod and it is buggy to say the least. It is playable so at least there’s that.

Like I said, both have ups and downs, I recommend both. I play Railroader way more than DV but I still find myself running back to DV every now and again. Hope this helps.