At my engineering school they taught Ada. I never had the opportunity to learn Ada because they switched to Java a decade before I started.
Unfortunately the lecturer that ran the unit retired the year I started my degree and by the time I had the prereqs required to do the course the faculty had run the course once without the original lecturer and it was apparently a disaster so they canned the unit until it could be rewritten from scratch, sans train set ... and in Java.
I still think about missing out on programming a train set. Years later
It’s not quite the same as having physical access to the train set, but a student eventually wrote a simulator for the Märklin train set [0]. Another student wrote an emulator for the TS-7200 used for the class [1] if you don’t want to test your kernel in QEMU.
Sounds like a nice hobby project to indulge in during your free time! It's easier than it has ever been, and it's a nice rabbit hole do dive into.
They even have open-source DCC decoders nowadays!
https://www.opendcc.de/elektronik/opendecoder/opendecoder_e....
https://ilabs.se/news/introducing-our-new-open-source-dcc-de...