It looks like the devs are really going for the replayability angle: There's both "Free Play" and "construction" modes, 5 campaigns and 14 smaller scenarios, and you can play on both Europe and North America.
It also sounds like a fair amount of work is being done to (at least partially) improve some of the more boring fiddly/micromanage-intensive aspects, such as automatic signal placement and the way tracks are constructed (though I'll reserve judgment on that until I've seen it in action).
Perhaps most important of all, however -- at least to me -- is that this game does *not* include you needing to wheel & deal in the boardroom, or work the stock market in any fashion (ala
Railroad Tycoon). I can appreciate there are those who do enjoy that aspect as well, and I can even understand the appeal in the abstract, but I'm not one of them myself.
Incidentally, this one-sentence Steam review of the first game has definitely roused my interest:
This is an amazing logistics puzzle game disguised as a railway sim