My university had a model train set, hooked up to some ancient 386 machines (and we're talking late 2010s here) and it was used for a real time programming course which was taught in Ada.

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