I wrote this a few months ago, and didn't realize until far too late. I decided to hold onto it until now, because I'm currently knees deep into NaNoWriMo!
I have been harboring a deep, dark secret: I love trains.
I have a few different hobbies. Computing is absolutely one of them. In addition to being into computers for their productive properties, I just like doing things with them. Writing is another, both non-fiction stuff for this blog, personal journal writing, and fiction writing in the form of NaNoWriMo.
And, it turns out, another is trains. I hadn't been specifically trying to hide it, but I hadn't really thought too hard about it for a few years. There was the time I wrote some Thomas the Tank Engine dystopian YA fanfiction, but otherwise it wasn't something I brought up or looked at all the time.
Work has been particularly stressful of late, and so when I get home, I'm not exactly brimming with brain power for some of my traditional computing tasks. My weekends are also truncated for medical reasons. In particular, things like setting up servers, rotating backup media, walking around, going places, and really in-depth, thoughtful writing have been a challenge.
And so, what I've been doing is looking at pictures of trains. I've recently graduated up to looking at videos of trains, and more recently, pictures and videos of model trains and let's play videos of people using train simulators.
I started looking at physical model train stuff a few months or weeks ago when I realized that there's a lot of content available in train simulator, but some of it looks and functions a little bit on the hokey side anyway, and it all seems very costly. On average, a route with some trains (to which you will want to add more trains anyway) costs about $40-80. This sounds like a lot until you consider that one of the best deals in HO scale passenger coaches right now is Walthers' Superliner coaches, which are at $45 until they sell out, down from $90 or so, and that's just the cost you pay for each superliner coach. You need at least three to model any kind of reasonable train, and a locomotive, and track, and a 4 by 8 foot space at the absolute minimum, to set up tracks.
And so, it dawned on me that model railroading would be very expensive in a lot of ways. Just for funsies, I went to a model train shop in the nearby big city. It was an illuminating experience. N scale is growing in popularity, with more people than ever starting with N scale than before, but not everything is there, some things are either harder to get in good quality or simply don't exist. N Scale is also costly to get started with and despite being a lot smaller than HO scale, still takes a lot of space.
I haven't done a whole lot with train simulation of late, but I do know that the current versions should work well on the computers I have, so it's not like I'm comparing spending a few thousand on building up a new model railroad with spending up to a few thousand building up a new PC on which to run train simulator. There is a new Train Simulator platform coming out based on the Unreal Engine 4, but I don't know yet what kind of compute power that will need.
With that in mind, it really seems like simulation and modeling are designed to give some very different experiences. Modeling appears to be a much more creative process than most of the common simulation experiences. That and in most modeling situations, you're looking at representing a line or route or an era, but with some creative freedom. You could, for example, model a rural shortline that uses Amtrak lettering, or model an Amtrak route that doesn't exist. Many successful model railroading projects appear to be based on fabricated locations, some even involve kitbashing or unpainted models to represent a completely fictional railroad.
With simulation on the other hand, the focus appears more to be on realistic operations on a real railroad, using real equipment. You could model and skin your own trains, and you can model a new environment, and there appears to be a scene building (albeit slowly because modeling and skinning aren't easy skills to get) around those things, they aren't exactly the core of why you'd buy Train Simulator.
It's possible that both of them can coexist in one life, but they're very different experiences. The other big differences really are in terms of commitment, space, infrastructure and what tasks you're doing.
For me, it's hard to tell which is "better" or which I might want to do more. I think that there are some different opportunities, especially in terms of things that aren't available or aren't licensed in one format or another. For example, Thomas the Tank Engine stuff is not available via simulation, but it's one of the most practical things to run in a small HO scale layout, because the trains are very small and their prototypical area is an island anyway.
The other trouble that seems to come with modeling is deciding what technologies to use with the models. A train set or a pretty simple loop of track is exciting for a while, but I think a lot of what modelers like about it is operations and a lot of the detailing things, which you need more resources and time and effort to do.
I was given this sage advice: do what's fun to you. Some people just want to watch a train go around in a circle and plop down a few plastic buildings, and some people want to superdetail to the point of crafting individual letters for a railway post office.
And, from that perspective, simulation might be more fun for me. I don't really want to spend a lot of time building or detailing things. I'll have to look at some different things. I probably just need to try each out to see which way I'd like to go. It makes sense to perhaps try both. I don't know what I'll end up doing in the long term, but it might be an interesting adventure.