totally.
I was thinking about this the other day, and you could keep the same style of metroidvania-lite level design of the first game while keeping the train.
Imagine the train portion of the game being a lot longer. As long as the mansion of RE1 before you leave it for the residence midway through the game. You can have this by making the train longer, and also maybe giving it three stories instead of two. Anyways, you play the train section and when it's over, it does't crash; it simply stops on the compound of the Umbrella training facility, which is also completely redesigned. It has outdoor forest-y areas now. The training facility consists of the second main area of the game, similar to RE1's courtyard, forest and residence. The third, and last, area of the game is, of course, an umbrella lab under the training facility.
The key thing here to really elevate the level design is to make sure the train and the training facility have a lot of interconnectedness, or "shortcut porn" as one Maximilian Dood likes to call it in Dark Souls. You can very easily do that by making the train stop in an arch form around the training facility. There would of course be multiple ways of entry back to the train, with doors on more than one carriage. The reason that would be is that, just like the mansion in RE1, when you first exit the train to explore the training facility, you are not done with the train, as many unexplored locked rooms remain. So the player explores the facility and finds keys and items that open more sections of the train as well as shortcuts linking certain areas of the training facility to the train.
The objective of the level design is to make the train and the training facility feel interconnected in the same way that the police precinct of RE2 felt, if not even more than that.
I'd make a map in paint if I had time; maybe later.
