I hear you, I feel you, and I want the same, but…

I want more. I want pedestrians to step off the curb a little early sometimes, to take risks when things seem safe. I want people driving to be distracted and run a red light or even hit a car or pedestrian. I want the grade of the track and rain to impact the acceleration and deceleration of a train. I want card driven late at night to have a higher rate of intoxicated drivers and to get stopped by police.

The simulation could go deeper. The angle of the track at a turn could increase or decrease the safe turning speed for a train. The time since the last rain would change how much current rain makes the road slippery due to oil build up. People going home from a football game at a stadium would start bunched up together and saturate public transport and roads unless you put extra services on. Maintenance issues caused by you penny pinching would manifest in a range of ways from a minor difficulty getting to speed to derailing a whole train. Neglected IT systems could have ever increasing outages. Outsourcing development of your infrastructure could lead to increased cost over time especially if the cost of switching was high.

At the same time the increased use of public transport would lower the number of visits to the emergency room for asthma attacks. Making extra services available for big events would reduce the number of altercations and following that incarcerations. Everything could have flow on effects not by having them hard coded but by having natural reactions in the way entities interact. Someone is more stressed because industrial noise is happening close to their house late at night? They are more likely to be hasty crossing the road and get hit by a car.

Most of this is too big for a single developer or even a fairly good team, but the description of the interactions could be done at higher levels by having summary interactions, more general things like good or bad mood, short or long travel time compared to expectations, and rates of interactions rather than actual events playing out. Still, it would be awesome.

There is a game in development that does some of this stuff. It’s called Junxtions I think. Looked interesting

Rail Route does not tick all the boxes and is higher level, but the signalling and shared track mechanisms are done quite well.

I liked factory town; the trains need to stop and stations to unload and refuel, and they only go one direction. Its somewhat simplified but satisfying.

Satisfactory has quite the satisfactory railway mechanics: in addition to what you say you want with them, you also have to place proper semaphores in order not to have them crashing each other.

Efficient networks require roundabouts and double one-way tracks, but sometimes it’s much more convenient to either have maze-like single one-way tracks (makes paths longer) or two-way tracks (blocks traffic, and gets worse the longer it is).

… there is no “intellgence” with vehicle paths, though: trucks and trains always pick the shortest path, and if they’ve gotta wait, they’re gonna wait (unless you screw up the semaphores, in which case kaboom).

I love engineering games like that but I don’t believe any game will check all the boxes you want.

Like others here I vouch for Satisfactory Trucks and especially the Railways. You can go quite deep there if you want. Drones do the clipping and are bit too easy so skip them.

While not what you exactly wished I’d say give Transport Tycoon or rather OpenTTD a go. While not as pedantic with traffic as you hope you will have a blast of a time doing beautifully orchestrated trains, airports, ferries and trucks/busses and optimizing the routes from resources to consumers.

And to reiterate. I don’t believe a game exists that matches most of your wishes. I hope it will eventually!

maybe open ttd which was free before but has now been rolled into transport tycoon (of which it was basically a clone/fork but with many more years of development by now, so not meant derogatory):

https://www.openttd.org/
https://store.steampowered.com/app/3766810/Transport_Tycoon_Deluxe/ (also on gog)

This isn’t helpful, but I was actually really disappointed by the people aspect of workers and resources. There’s no agent model with people picking routes to their workplace or needs. They’re just another type of resource you shunt around with limited models of searching from transit stops.

But yeah as far as trains are concerned factorio does seem to be the best available.

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Transport Fever 3 might do some of this stuff. The pedestrians and traffic were quite good in Transport Fever 2 but that one had the train issue you talked about