Well if you want a LONG story I can do that. :hehe: 1979 I went to Radio Shack to buy some IC chips for a Heathkit computer I was building, saw the TRS-80 color computer (similar to Commodore 64, 64k RAM, used a cassette recorder for storage, 13" television for a monitor) and never finished the Heathkit. Played assorted flight simulators, ship simulators, driving simulators, and first person shooters for the next 22 years, searched in vain for a train simulator. Closest I ever found was Abracadata's "Train Engineer" in the early 90s, pretty cartoonish compared to other types of simulators.
Finally in June 2001 saw Microsoft Train Simulator and bought that, sold all my HO scale stuff over the next couple years and never went back to model railroading.
December 2001 the first Trainz demo was available, downloaded and tried that out, didn't like it - it didn't look as good as MSTS and at the same time didn't run as smoothly. Lot of my MSTS friends "jumped ship" over the next year or two, mainly because surveyor was easier to create routes and more stable than that godforsaken MSTS route editor.
Fall of 2003 I was at the Great American Train Show in Wheaton Il, selling off the last of my model railroad stuff, saw two guys running a demo of TRS2004. Yuck. 1.5ghz Pentium III which was almost twice as fast as my AMD Athlon 800, and TRS2004 was a jerky slideshow that STILL didn't look as good as MSTS on what was considered a state of the art system at the time.
Stayed with MSTS until October 2007, when a friend sent me a gift, Kuju Rail Simulator. This is promising, looks a lot better than MSTS and runs pretty smooth, doesn't have nearly as many bugs. But it didn't come with a full scenario editor you could program AI traffic trains with since that part wasn't finished at release time. A few months later in early 2008 the scenario tools were released, and I said PUT THIS BACK, it's still not finished! :n: Over the next couple years the answers to that from the developers could be summed up "It already does what WE want it to do, who cares what YOU want." Got Railworks as a gift in 2009, that was never any better, and every STEAM update seemed to break two things that previously worked for every new fix, and they "further enhanced" the scenario tools and AI dispatcher with useless fluff that never worked instead of ripping it out and starting over. This last RW3 fiasco I never bothered to try, even if it wasn't all screwed up there's no point since the essential ingredient, intelligent AI traffic you can actually work with, is still missing.
While suffering through all that, Phil Skene was also trying Failsim and NeverWorks, and he was posting example videos of the Trainz AI dispatcher capabilities to show the developers what he was looking for in a train simulator, essentially the same thing I was looking for. Different words but the developers gave him the same answer, "It already does what WE want it to do, who cares what YOU want." So spring of 2010 Phil sent me TRS2004 as a gift, couple of my other MSTS friends who "went over to the dark side" way back when gifted me 2010 and 12, so here I am, mostly because of Phil Skene who opened my eyes to the simulation aspects of this "toy train game" over at trainsim.com and UKtrainsim.com. It still has a lot of things that could use improvement, but it does most of the really important things better than the other available train simulators.
. After that, I bought TRS2006 and was happy after that and then came here in 2007.
