Although not directly part of the "model railway" hobby, there's no doubt that Train Simulators are of great interest to railway modellers, and are helping get more people interested in railways whilst also giving people who simply don't have the room or time to make a model layout a chance to have their dream railway - on their computer. Three of the more popular simulators are:

Trainz Railway Simulator 2006 [official website] Trainz Railway Simulator 2006 (or TRS2006 for short) was released at the end of 2005, and is the latest version of the Trainz series from Australian developer Auran. The UK version is marketed in the UK by Cambridgeshire based Just Trains and has a retail price of around £29.99.

TRS2006 features animated interactive industries, including a coalmine, container port, forest, and lumber mill. Having these interactive industries means you can drive a loaded tanker train from the oil field to the refinery, where you can unload the oil and then load diesel and petrol before driving to the coal mine where the diesel provides fuel for the machinery to mine coal. Hop in to the coal train and load it up before driving to the powerstation and dropping the load from your wagons at the discharge point.

Route creation takes place in the Surveyor tool from within TRS2006, and is much easier to use than the route editor in Microsoft's Train Simulator. Surveyor makes use of a point-and-click system where you simply drag out "splines" of track, place your buildings and scenery, and "paint" the ground textures on to the baseboard much like dropping scatter on a model railway.

• TRS2006 website - Auran's own official website contains thousands of objects including buildings, locos, wagons and even full layouts which other users have made and uploaded to the Auran servers.
• Trainz Luvr is a "one-stop-shop" for the Auran Trainz train-sim. In here you will find anything and everything relating to the game, or in some case trains in general.
• TrainzObjectz is home to the highly useful TrainzObjectz tool, along with a number of models - many of which have been included as third party content in TRS2004/TRS2006.
• Razorback Railway is the first "Virtual Railway" for Auran's Trainz and features a massive map with plenty to see.
• TRS2006 review on GamesPaper and a review of the West Somerset Railway add-on route Train Driver which can be used as an expansion to TRS2006.

Microsoft Train Simulator [official website] Microsoft Train Simulator (or MSTS for short) is probably the simulator which most people have heard of, mainly down to the huge amounts of publicity which it has received from Microsoft. The simulator retails at around £34.99 and was released in 2001. It has since been re-released as a budget priced title.

There are a number of commercial add-on packs also available for it, including a modern day London to Brighton Route, Severn Valley Railway, and recently released Nene Valley Railway. There's also a huge number of foreign routes such as a German High Speed Trains, Japanese Routes and The Heidi Express Alpine trains add-on packs which are available either online or from local computer game retailers.

A route editor and activity editor is included with MSTS, although neither of them come with much documentation and take a fair amount of work to understand fully. Once you get the hang of them though they do become much easier to use, but still no where near as easy as Trainz Railway Simulator's Surveyor.

• Microsoft Games Insider is a website from Microsoft Studios and gives you a look at some of the behind the scenes aspects of MSTS, along with details of Train Simulator 2 which is currently under development.
• ChrisTrains is home to a number of quality freeware add-on's for MSTS, and also showcases some of the commercial content which have been developed by Chris Longhurst.
• Blue Arrow are the developer of the Severn Valley Railway add-on pack.
• Europeanbahn are the developer of the London Brighton Express route and add-on pack, TGV TrainSim Pack and also have details of their new EastCoast Express route from London Kings Cross to York.
• 3D Train Stuff have developed a number of quality US and UK add-on's including the Cambrian Route.

Boso View Express [official website]
Boso View Express (or BVE for short) is a free simulator from Japan, but has proven very popular with British route creators, who have made a number of real routes such as the Birmingham Cross City route and numerous tube lines such as the Northern Line.

It's a much more basic simulator than either TRS2006 or MSTS, and only really features a forward looking view instead of a true 3D world unlike the other two simulators on this page (although there are tools which can view the route from different angles giving an impression of it being 3D). However where BVE is more simple it's also much more advanced, especially in areas such as the Physics and Sound.

BVE doesn't have an easy to use route editor and instead requires lots of hand typed statements in a text file, which takes many hours of work just for short amounts of route. There is a route building tool available (from the BVE-routes website) although this doesn't allow for the more advanced features which make the hand coded routes so very impressive when some of the more advanced techniques are used.

• Download Boso View Express from the official (Japanese) website - if you need help with finding the file and installing it, check out the guide at Train Sim Central.
• BVE UK train collection - A collection of UK locomotive and multiple units designed for BVE.
• Rail Sim Routes UK is home of the Birmingham Cross-City and Watford Junction to Rugby projects for BVE, and also has numerous help resources and developer standards.
• BVE-Routes.com is a huge international BVE route database, and an ideal place to start your search for new routes to download.
• Trainsimcentral.co.uk is home to a number of popular BVE routes including the LU Northern Line and underground stock.

Useful train simulator websites:

• UK Trainsim - a massive online library of free downloads for Microsoft Train Simulator along with stock and routes few other simulators.
• Train-Sim.com - an American site which has some very lively forums discussing all aspects of Railway related simulations, and also hosts a large download library.