Rating: 
Summary: My all time favourite PC purchase
Review: I can't explain what this game/simulation has brought to my PC game experience. Once I popped the CD into the drive and began the game, I suddenly felt this was the game I was waiting for, what my PC was waiting for in fact!OK, enough of that flowery talk, in simple terms this is a superb train simulator, the best. It allows you to drive a various selection of engines (diesel, electric, steam) and trains (passenger, goods) along real life routes and tracks, with great detail paid to scenery and rolling stock. There are many enjoyable activities to keep you immersed for the forseeable future and I can see you playing this one for a long time to come, particulary with the subsequent add-ons giving the game an unlimited amount of shelf life. This simulation will appeal to both serious train enthusiasts and the casual train admirer. Many may think this simulation is for and aimed at trainspotters, nothing could be further from the truth. It's got a wide appeal from the young to the old. Added to that, by driving on these routes, it also teaches you so much about foreign railways and the geography of foreign towns and cities. Just perfect, a great gift for at anytime of the year!
Rating: 
Summary: disapointed
Review: I would like to purchase this game but I am told it does not work on Windows XP Home edition. When will you have one that does?
Rating: 
Summary: What do you expect for [price]
Review: I bought this for my train-addicted 6-year-old. I installed it on a less than state-of-the-art PII-350 with 256MB RAM and a Matrox G400 card.
My son is enraptured driving each route, and has started to "mix & match", running the Flying Scotsman on the Northeast Corridor, for example. I've tried some of the scenarios, stopping at stations, trying to stay on schedule. If anything, it's given me a greater appreciation for Amtrak's operations.
Unlike many reviewers here, we've experienced zero crashes (the computer kind; my son finds derailing the Acela at high speed very amusing).
As others have stated, the online PDF manual sucks, both in its lack of depth and the inability to refer to it during play.
The graphics and sound are amazing, even if the game play is a bit dull and lacking in imagination: Why are there no people on the platforms? Why don't the deer scatter (or splatter)?
On the other hand, the game has offered few major frustrations, which is very important when playing a new game with a child.
The game is rated for "all" audiences, although I would have liked an "appropriate" age range. If your child can't read yet, be prepared to spend a lot of time explaining...
Rating:
Summary: Funny software witch requaires high-level hardware.
Review: My grandfather was longtime train engineer driving either steam and diesel locomotives in Estonia (narrow gauge railways). I'm really true train fan. That's reason why I bought this simulator. But current software not only requires extremely quick computer, lots of hard drive space and ultra-performance video card. I found most important thing beeing amount of RAM memory - no less than 1GB to run trains smoothly. I have for example GF4ti4200 video adapter with 128 Mb of DDram and 1GB basic DDram and even can't use most high resolutions (over 1280x1024 px 32bit). Performance was improved totally when I upgraded RAM memory from 256Mb to 1Gb. Keep it in mind - is well-known thing, all simulators have very high requirements for computers to run.
Graphics look good, but I've seen many add-ons witch looked much better. Tools and editors are very complicated to work with and help is not easy to follow.
Resume: buy this software only if You have NEW COMPUTER WITH HIGH LEVEL COMPONENTS. Do not respect technical specifications given by Microsoft. You'll get interesting experience about railroading, but only with good stuff. With older machines You pay just for nothing, no fun. I'm also waiting for the new version of TrainSim with all bugfixes and improved features.
Rating:
Summary: One of Microsoft's Best Simulators Ever!
Review: This is a great simulator. Not only is it challenging, but enables you to have fun and experience the exitement of trains. This game will leave you and your family with many hours of fun train driving. I recommend this game for all ages.
Rating:
Summary: No Support for this game = stay away!
Review: No matter, how much you love trains, keep in mind that this game is NOT supported! By that, I mean that if you go to Microsoft's TrainSim site, there are FAQs for how to learn to run a train better, but NO support for how to troubleshoot the game, if it does not work. The game itself contains a troubleshooter to help with video problems, but in my case, I have a keyboard problem which is not addressed by the troubleshooter. MS does not have a support option for this game, not even a way to send them email. They include links to multiple TrainSim fan sites, with many of them having boards. When sifting through the boards, you see many postings from (desperate) people having problems with this games and nobody being able to help them. MS recently released an update which did not fix my problem -- nor does it seem to have fixed other people's problems, according to the message boards. My recommendation is to stay away from any game that is basically unsupported. Unfortunately, this is one of them. Save your money for something better, or wait for release 2.0 or even 3.0
Rating:
Summary: Great Sim
Review: I really enjoy playing this one. My son also loves it. We've become big rail fans ( needs more steam engines though). We found several great websites with free engines and routes (Including a 'Thomas the tank engine' my son plays with)
Rating:
Summary: Like being inside a real train
Review: I think this game is terrific but still not "perfect" Don't get me wrong... I'm a huge fan of trains and I'd loved to become a train engineer, but this game lacks a bit of entertainment. What do I mean by "entertainment"? Well, once your train is rolling and all signs are clear then you can comfortably go to get a sandwich and a beverage and everything will be the same. And in those "hard" scenarios, all you gotta do is to speed up and brake from time to time... Apart from that nuisance, the game is perfect... to drive a steam locomotive like the "flying scotsman" is awesome and thrilling. The tutorial is excellent and lets you catch the basics on how to run a train. I've added an expansion pack of the Eurochunnel and now you can be on the cabin of the TGV from Britain to the continent. Good choice for train fans
Rating: 
Summary: A fast machine...
Review: No, not the locomotives in Train Simulator, it's your computer that will need to be FAST. Our fairly new 2.2 Ghz P4 with Geforce 4 card still stutters in some views. Forget the stated system requirements. If your system is up to the task, the trains are good looking and so is the scenery, but that's all this game is, operating trains. Sounds facinating, and it really is in a way, but it does grow boring fairly soon. Just imagine driving an 18 wheeler for the first time. Up through the gears, perched way over traffic. Cool experince, and then you just drive and drive and drive. Much like running a train. "Wow cool" quickly becomes "just a job". If you already like flying simulated airplanes for hours on end and trains appeal to you, you may be glad you bought it. Otherwise, I say it's best to leave this train at the station.
Rating:
Summary: Simulating a premature release...
Review: This would have been a great simulator if it had more time to bake. It is out of the oven too soon and Microsoft's development vendor, Kuju, has taken a number of wrong turns development-wise. A blatant example is that this Microsoft program does not use the standard Microsoft Windows window gadgets from their own operating systems, but rather "faked-in" window gadgets (which do not scale to your display size). Reading the release text, popular OEM graphics cards, such as ATI, are clearly designated as unsupported by Train Simulator. My IBM PC Aptiva has graphic problems with this Microsoft-published software, despite my toying with a "troubleshooting" program, enclosed in a revision and lacking a real explanation. Still my pointer endlessly flickers and some fonts are unreadable. Kuju's simulation editors are so arduous, quirky and buggy, Microsoft has declared they will not tech support them. Dedicated, steadfast and resilient power-users spend countless, family-free hours a) writing new programs to make the simulator configuarble, b) making the simulator more accurate, c) gathering tables and spreadsheets for recognizing objects, track sections, and explaining files and formats, and d) preparing web sites to educate and tutor what MS and Kuju have failed to communicate to the users (despite a folder of incomplete Tech Docs bundled with the simulator). Otherwise, you would not know that "A1t7mStrt.s" means a 7 meter straight track section. There has been little if no attempt to explain the mandatory display options settings for the game, whose button is amusingly labeled as "Advanced", as if one did not need to use it to get the best performance verses graphics compromise. There are mathematical problems in the physics of the simulator such as: a) actual speedometer going in the opposite direction predicted by the projected speedometer, b) couplers breaking when trains couple too slowly and c) locos getting "stuck" between two railroad cars not being able to push their way out. There are severe logic problems or just plain laziness with the simulator's programming: it is unable to accept a closed-loop circuit (i.e. that circle around your Xmas tree)and cannot handle an activity that goes out-and-back using a loop.--Strike that, it actually is able to make loops, but it will result in your PC crashing without warning. In fact you are swayed into the direction of crashing your PC by the supplied information: The on-line editor help uses a model railroad (minitature train layout) as an analogy to explain many of the concepts presented, but blatantly omits "do not run the track into a circle or else the simulator will fail"-yet there is at least one closed-loop in most model railroads. I often feel I make more progress building my actual model railroad than building with this simulator for a given evening. Editor and Simulator cannot be loaded simultaneously, so one can spend countless hours loading and unloading these in trying to figure out what is causing an unpublished problem. The strength of the simulator is the presentation of the 8-supplied routes. These are striking, particularly the secondary Japanese route and the Austrian route. But the English route is poor, mere grass and viaducts, no infrastructure to support the astounding amount of vehicles waiting at grade crossings - again showing as "rushed out the door". Add-ons are difficult to incorporate because Kuju has conceived so many needless files and interdependancies that you may need to be a computer scientist to add your typical on-line-available engine. The simulator takes up gobs of disk space because each object needs to have an identical copy of itself on disk for every route that it appears in. In summary, unless you are captivated by trains, don't buy this. If you like trains, you will be entertained for a time running the supplied scenarios. If you want to change around the simulation, you will pull your hair out first. A second release is really needed to make this good software.
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