Still waiting for a successor!
I've spent soooooo many hours in this game. It's one of the best tycoon games there is. It's really satisfying to get an epic railroad/industry network working.
What makes this game better than Railroad Tycoon 2 is that there is a better economy/market simulation in the map, and that products also travel through rivers and maps. This makes for a much more realistic situation, because all the industries participate in the market, insted of being reduced to a factory just waiting for some nice guy capitalist to pick the goodies up. Also worth mentioning is a whole lot better way to lay the rails than in the previous installation.
What makes RR3 a pleasurable experience, than say Transport Tycoon Deluxe, is that it still concentrates on the big picture without a whole lot of micro management. You can have a single rail track with trains coming from both sides, they just slide through (the other one stops, other keeps going). You don't need to design complex swicharoos and whatnots to stop trains from colliding to each others. You're an industrial/railway tycoon, not a train manager. That makes designing your railnetwork more fluid and flexible. But if you are into miniscule type of realistic railway designing, I suggest you to try Transport Tycoon Deluxe, or Sid Meier's Railroads! for a dumbed down industry. Still, when your network gets bigger and more complex, you will eventually want to optimize your network, so you don't glutch your profits because of trains stuck in traffic. But it's not mandatory to start complex, which is what I like.
As title suggest, I'm still waiting for a spiritual successor for Railroad Tycoon 3. A tycoon game that approaches railways from their impact to economy, instead of micro managing individual trains and tracks.