It feeling like "a really round about way of simulating that experience" is probably because it evolved into being a train simulator out of playing around with Clickteam; I sort of improvised a game. I think the initial impetus was something more like the toddler's toy we call an 'activity centre' in the UK and I think might be called a 'busy box' in the US; i.e. I wanted to make a thing in which you had a lot of buttons to press and things happened.

It is pre-rendered. 600 frames of animation churned out using Blitz3D's GrabImage. But then I had to shrink the images really small or file size for the whole game would have been too big - and I rather liked how it ended up looking. It would have made more sense to actually make the thing in Blitz itself but I was just wanting to test out some things in Clickteam. I'm glad you found it funny, I have to say that something about the sounds - real train horns - made me smile too.

No need. In my head, there's sort of a theme around sentimentality, loneliness and delusion that relates to the character in the film in a way - but it's so tangential that you may not even get it if you do know the film; it was just in the back of my mind as I was putting it together. People seem to be finding it funny rather than anything else, treating it for what it is - a silly toy masquerading as a train simulator.