Do you have any advice on how someone can/should get started learning it?
Honestly, the
best way is to find a group that meets somewhere near you, get in touch with them, and tell them you want to learn. They can set up a game to teach you (and possibly others) and you will pick up a great deal more about how the games are actually played in that environment than by just picking up a game and trying it blind with other friends who haven't played before.
You can learn the gist of how these games work here: (still the best video after these years for a summary)
You might be able to find groups of people playing near you via BoardGameGeek; there is also an 18xx Slack channel where you could ask around (I can post an invite if you're interested). You can watch a live play of 1889 with a brief teach here - played by experienced players - and get an idea of how things go:
If you're savvy enough with computers to grab DOSBox and look up some things via Google, you can get a flavor for how the games work playing against an AI using the 1990's "1830" PC game. (You can find the files for that on abandonware sites.)
If you have exhausted all the options for local play, there are also some online platforms that I use all the time (I'm in 6 or 7 concurrent async games right now). The downside of those is that I think it's harder to learn the systems and mechanics for the first time that way. But that's also something I (and the community) can help you get into if you're interested.
The most-recommended titles to play first are usually 1830, 1889, and 1846. I recommend one of the first two (or 18Chesapeake when it's finally published and more widely available later this year - it's designed to be a somewhat shorter learning game that still has all the flavor and a lot of the edges of the 1830-like games).
I'm happy to answer questions you might have about this... it's kind of a lot to get into at first but there is a community out there (including myself, of course) that can help you with it.
