If someone thinks there's money to made in creating new versions of these simulators then the franchise and key team members will be picked up and work continued on a smaller scale. The key question is how many of these things do you have to sell to get a return on the money you've spent? With the increasing sophistication of consoles - eg Playstation 3, XBox 360 - the PC only market is shrinking while at the same time the growing graphics capability requires more man hours work to exploit it.
Maybe the future for simulators of this kind is the open software route?
I would have bought Train Simulator 2 but I would have been disappointed if, as is suggested in those reports you linked to, the underlying game engine was still a generation behind the graphics capability of my current video card.
David