>>5700
yes

Train Sim World is decent, but pricey. You'll find odd little bugs and recycled sounds in some of the DLC, but the graphics are pretty damn good and the functionality of little gizmos like class lights and alerters is nice to have. I don't know about other sims, unfortunately.

Run8 seems to be pretty decent though pricey. Seems pretty realistic, though a steep learning curve.

Only one of them is made by chantards so that might be positive or negative depending on your pov.

>>5700

Well I know a couple of decent games involving trains.

The first is Rail of War, not a sim but an old top-view flash game (Standalone, meaning it came packaged with adobe flash player), basically you had to deliver cargo and stuff to stations and you could get weapons to kill enemies before they kill you. It was quite fun and it even had a level editor.

Another more open-world sim would be Minetest with some train mods installed. Minetest is basically opensource and free remake of minecraft, and it has hundreds of mods available, including a pretty epic set of mods to build trains and a railway network, with lots of objects to play around with. Its also really cool.

What about board games?

There are of course:
-Ticket to Ride, seems to be strictly casual.
-Then there's Age of Steam, appears to have more focus on building and operation.
-And the mammoth that is 18xx, has the focus on finance.

Is there something notable that I'm forgetting here?

If you actually are a hobbyist, what's best version of each series?

>>5785
Um. I should have removed that terrible "One Way Ticket" adaptation.
(It's the same in Finnish - "Menolippu", the expression 'ticket to ride' was rendered as such.)

Anyway, almost a year has passed and in the meanwhile I have slowly been edging towards the 18xx series. I'm now in an online game of 1860 and in a week I'll shove this thing down to the throat of of a friend physically.

As of now, I'm essentially playing against mr. Morgan and mr. Vanderbilt here so I'm just going to explore the mechanics of the game and cause general havoc on the board. I'm thinking of pump and dump on the IOW... The only question is when; should I take my money out now as I have tokenized all the important eastern stations and made the company useless in the long term or should I buy a "3-train" and pay more dividents for myself and then dump right before my 2-trains rust? It is a dilemma, currently I'm broke yet I'd need some capital to place my real winning bid in a timely manner.

Derail Valley is pretty good these days with the new realism overhaul, if a bit cartoonish in some places. Admittedly, stock the game has only a bunch of euro locos and one freedom adjacent steam locomotive, but that is what mods are for.