Railroad Corporation

If you like management and tycoon games I can recommend this. It is not the best railway game I've played, but it's quite good and challenging without being too hard. It has quite a bit of micromanaging compared to other similar games (Railway Empire) but on the other hand you don't need to manage railway directions in detail, as the AI solves this perfectly itself. It's also just not about railways, you need to take advantage of industries, personell and the overall economy to be a winner.

Major boost from RT3. Complex enough to keep it interesting. Laid-back enough to keep it fun.

So far, I'm really enjoying this. It does remind me of the Railroad Tycoon series which I really enjoyed. It's been a while since I've played a good railroading game and I'm happy I found this one.

This reminds me of an old playstation favorite, Railroad Tycoon II. The scenarios are sometimes easy, but often challenging. It doesn't seem to progress from easy to challenging very well. I enjoy upgrading research to unlock better trains, but they have very few to choose from. I also like how the objectives seem to change in the scenarios. When restarting the scenarios, they don't throw in any random extra quests, so you always have similar objectives. Also, some of the optional objectives do not make profitability sense. Overall, it is a fantastic game and I look forward to the second edition which will bring more trains.

Is it the best train sim I've ever played? Not really.
Can you get some fun out of this for the money? Yes, I think so.
I got it on sale for about 10€ and that's what it's worth in my opinion. It's an okay train sim with some new ideas like political lobby work etc. but these concepts are realizes in quite a shallow way and can basically be ignored, because it is so easy to make tons of money anyway. That's my main point of criticism, it seems way too easy. I started playing the base game campaign, am at mission 7 now and didn't have any problems so far, swimming in money every time.
The seconds most annoying thing is the train routing, which doesn't seem to work properly - or to be more specific, which seems to stop working once you have too many trains ( ~20). All of a sudden trains will start to get stuck in train stations "waiting for free track" while all tracks are completely free. After an eternity of waiting for whatever they'll eventually start moving again, but it makes zero sense. That's just one problem about the routing, another one is that trains partially drive into the wrong direction and can't find their target without moving to completely opposite directions a couple of times. I think some bugfixing work is missing there and it definitely hurts the game.
After all, I can still recommend it if you just want to enjoy building stuff, setting up logistics and growing cities by delivering required goods there. Just don't expect it to work as well as in a fully developed transport sim like Transport Fever for example. Oh yeah and definitely don't get it at full price, I think 5-10 € is fine for this game. For 30€ get something like Transport Fever instead.

Who doesn't love trains. ;)

I'm really on the fence for this one...
For a train game the track Laying is really TERRIBLE! No cross tracks, minimum traffic control... and for me it's a very important aspect for this genre.
BUT on the other hand I very much enjoy the train, economy and business micromanagement which adds a lot of debt to the game.