Train simulators are still around. Trainmaster was good for its time, but was wiped out by Microsoft's train simulator (MSTS). MSTS was mostly abandoned by MS after a couple of updates (one of which removed the copy protection - yay!) but has a wide fan base that still supports it. There's a huge collection of both free and payware routes and equipment for it. Check out [www.trainsim.com] for a sampling (there are many other similar sites, especially for European, Russian, and Japanese trains).

MSTS has shown its age, and hasn't been sold for many years, but can still run in Windows 10 with some serious tweaking (see [www.steamforme.net] ). Open Rails ( [www.openrails.org] ) is more modern with many more features, but can still run the old MSTS stuff. Free/open source project.

TrainSimWorld from Dovetail Games is the biggest commercial train simulator game. Compared to MSTS and Open Rails, it's better in terms of visuals but not quite as good for operations. And it's very difficult to build your own content - unless you are a serious developer and register with Dovetail you pretty much have to buy everything. OpenBVE is the latest version of a Japanese simulator. There are several others for specific things, like trolleys and subways.

Basically, the newer the software, the better the computer has to be. MSTS ran on 486's when released so the CPU power these days is almost excessive; however, it doesn't work with most AMD video cards since Windows 7 - AMD dropped support for some features of DirectX 9 that MSTS requires in non-legacy drivers - so you need a nVidia card to run it in Windows 8 or 9. Intel (built-in, processor) graphics mostly works, but poorly. Some curmudgeons keep an old computer running XP around for MSTS.

Open Rails, TSW, and the current specialized simulators requires more modern computers and run fine in Windows 7-10. OR needs at least a quad-core CPU (real quad-core is better than 2 cores with hyperthreading) at a reasonable speed (2.5 GHz is a good minimum; more of course is better) to run well. All run best with at least 4GB of RAM (8+ is better to leave room for background tasks) and 64-bit Windows. All need a modern graphics card with at least a couple of GB for best performance.

Interestingly, MSTS works well in Linux under Wine. The newer ones don't, though there's an ongoing project to move Open Rails from a DirectX/.Net platform to Mono (Monogame), which might allow it to run "natively" in Linux not requiring Wine. We'll see about that.

For those in the US, the best place to start is trainsim.com. Excellent forum setup and huge file library. Fair warning, though: if you want to use things from that library, even in Open Rails, you *will* need to find a copy of the original MSTS. Most routes, especially, use a lot of objects that came with MSTS. Commercial and some newer routes don't depend on that, but most free routes do. So you need to get it and install it even if you never actually use it. Good luck and happy hunting.