Not bad for it's time. Recommend you read this
I played the other railroad games even the new ones (sid meirs railroad sucks balls)
What I love about this game is the economy. Unlike the older one, resources travel to the towns rather than you having to build tracks all over the place to pickup resources. This means you get to build real railroad routes. The economy doesn't crash every 5 years like the older one and what you are your competitors do actually affect the economy in the towns you support. But this doesn't mean that towns you don't support gets dry. Resources will slowly trickle to neighboring towns which will cause some growth eventually. If you suck dry the resources of a town, the economy will go down like in real life. (ie you take all the milk of one town, those people don't get there needs for milk thus decrease slightly in growth, but your company profits. the trick is to take some milk to towns that get no milk at all and you profit more greatly as the demand is high and your current town demands are satisfied too)
Trains are more accurate in maintenance and specs and speed. Even the AI is a bit smarter so having competitors are fun, because you can play with the stock market more accurately and crash there stocks and buy them out.(just like corporate America does to the Canadians)
Support them in making a new Railroad game because what they did lack was some stability and graphics. But then again, the graphics were good for it's time.
You may find it hard to play on Windows 7, not sure if they patched it yet. But I was only able to play it on my PC and not my laptop.
CPU goes nuts because of all the calculations it takes to play this game. There is so much thought put in to the economy it's worth wasting your time on.
If you played the previous railroad games, you will appreciate this one. If you haven't played any of them, you may find it difficult to get started in. It may take a couple of hours to get use too as the instructions on how to play is scarce.
There is no active community anymore, but you may find some stray forums where users posted new maps and mods. This game is mod friendly, but sometimes requires special programs and formats to make new maps. Thus it's very time consuming, which could be way the community died.