My kid is 11 and has built more than one route, he's imported the terrain data. Set up Google overlay and had me trypsin all over the country so he can do some research. He's learned uk signalling atleast including the old semaphore signalling. The user interface is mostly graphical it's quite simple. Simulators often are expensive.
TSC is definitely an investment and probably more immersive than TSW when it comes to sounds/physics combined with the wealth of mods that are available. I have never created a route and it's probably very complex but I hope to learn some day. I mainly just operate career scenarios and standard scenarios along with an occasional quick drive to go from point A to point B
I play TSC and trainz 19 22 ontop of TSW 2 through 4 as for level and route building im not interested due to compexity of it . I leave that to those who can create good routes levels..Iam more into taking the cars and locomotives and building up my own freight trains deciding what cars i want to use etc then operating them.in Trainz i made up a Conrail unit steel coil train used 2 CR SD40 2 and CR coil cars loaded steel coils into them since in Trainz you can load cars with various freight loads made it 60 cars so far but looks good when i run it on a route in lineside camera mode . I enjoy downloading well made scenarios in TSC that others do .in TSW i made a few locomotive and car paint schemes but got away from it in tsw4 they made it too complicated to use i found the older TSW 2 and 3 livery designer easier to use for a novice like me.. I also just leave that to the people who create excellent liveries in creators club..
in TSW im disappointed that the formation designer hasnt been made complete yet that and free roam are the features i like most in TSW 4 since again i love to build my own trains my way and run them on any route of my choice .
I picked up Trainz on sale recently for the track building, but haven't gotten around to it. Seemed a lot easier than the "learn programming" editing of TSC and TSW. I'm barely a computer use, let alone a programmer =-)
I can vouch for Surveyor as being the best route editor out there. Just a shame the driving experience is so awful. Now here's an interesting aside re TSC vs TSW. As TSC lacks a randomiser as TSW has, though I would allocate each route to a playing card and then just do a random shuffle and deal. Imagine my surprise when 52 cards (plus Joker) is nowhere near enough to fit in all my TSC routes. At the moment I've just collected the "best of" in the 52 and will replace them with the standby routes as and well or if all the scenarios on a particular route get played out. But a sobering thought enough route content there to keep me going for years!
