June update:
I’m working on the player game menus. I've created the game 'start screen’ and have got the player name and options selections completed. Whilst I have created it with options to start with a ranking from Insect to Top Man and scenarios for NED or Class xx Mileage Man I expect the latter will be limited to NED in the initial release. I’m creating a requirements and mileage list for the Top Man. The ranking will be based on a percentage of this ‘persons’ score.

May update:
Completed the part of the program that moves (and fails) the trains. A train is checked for delays when it arrives or departs a station, plus is it following another train into it or does it have to wait for a connection? In between stations it may lose or gain time and most importantly fail! Looking at the first results loco hauled trains lose about 4 minutes on average whilst the rest lose three.

I’ve looked at the points scored for new engines and mileage and what a player will start with. In future versions I should be able to provide variants to allow people to focus on just doing, say, class 40s and still get a competitive score. In the initial version a player will start with about half the points the computer controlled players get but I think over 18 game turns they should be able to catch up. That player will have the lowest rank, an Insect. It is based on what I had in May 80 but I will create scenarios for those who want to focus on 40s or 47s. First I need to learn how to program for Windows!

April update:
Additional Saturday loco hauled and non-loco hauled trains have been added to the database.
All the loco hauled trains have been checked against Railgenarchive to identify what types/categories of locos worked each train on Summer Saturdays and those details have been updated.

I am currently looking at each train to determine if it is following another (the rule being less than one hour behind) or has a connection with another train (either as a portion, a crossing on single track, is the same stock or might be held to connect. This work is 40% complete and I’ve put that on hold until I have completed the game program.

I have still to add Sunday and midweek loco hauled trains, including railtours and adex’s. This will be done after I have finished testing the program against the Saturday data.



The following issues need to be addressed:
These are various ideas where I haven’t decided how to deal with them in the game.

Class 08 shunters
There are three places in the game where it would be possible to get an 08 shunter move. Doncaster overnight and Sheffield/Huddersfield during the day. I know my moves were influenced by whether I needed the Doncaster shunter or not, likewise the Sheffield shunter although my memory says this was a bit harder to get if you were waiting at Sheffield to get on the portion that would be shunted. I never did the Huddersfield shunter because it was a poor move when a lot of locos were required. So I need to put them in the game but they won’t score highly because we tended to overlook them in the 1980s and you could never clear them, perhaps not even a shed’s allocation in the game. Special rules to ensure that the same loco can be at that station for several weeks in a row.

Lickey Bankers
Apart from the booked Glasgow sleeper train these will only rescue failures that occur to northbound trains between Cheltenham and Birmingham. The chance that you will be on or see such a train is remote, maybe never in the game but you can always get the bankers by doing S19 at the end of the day. The game will also allow you to do S19 midweek so you will not have to plan your Saturday moves to get them on that day. The same pair of locos will stay at Bromsgrove for a couple of weeks or more so, like the 08s this is another case where what worked the previous day/week will be remembered for the next week/game turn.

Sunday Aber’s and Skeg 20s
I see that on several Sundays one of my first moves of the day would be to take the 25s on the Aberystwyth train to Wolverhampton. The pair would almost always be one of those that had worked on the Saturday. Similarly with the Derby - Skegness 20s, the locos would quite often be a pair from the previous day. This becomes more important in the midweek moves when new 20s on the Skegs would determine my evening move. So in the game these trains will find the previous day’s locos have a high chance of reappearing. I’ll have a look at what happened in real life and make the game behave similarly.

Midweek moves
It is not my intention to create a game where you play 18 weeks/24 hrs per day including all the midweek days. To be honest with you I think it would be much easier for me to write to Mike, ask him for the data structure and create a 1980 version of Hellfire! which would then use his program BUT it would still take me years to set that up. I suspect some of you would prefer it to be that way because it would be so realistic, I’m sorry, I don’t want that level of detail. I haven’t decided how to solve this but I will start by assuming I can set up ’scenarios’ which then fix the trains which you would travel on. Midweek moves would assume you are based in Birmingham and can only get to New Street for 1800 each day because of your job. (In time I can expand this to other starting points if it proves to be a success). You would be told what locos were known or planned to be work, such as the Skeg 20s, the Lickey Bankers and so on but there would be gaps in what you know. You then select a defined set of moves to cover the 20s on the Skegs and the missing loco numbers are filled in (or updated as if it was dud gen or swapped). Those become your moves/mileages for that day. For example, one Birmingham scenario would be to cover the evening 25s on the Crewe - Cardiff so you would know the electric to Crewe but may not know either of the 25s on the Whitchurch move and definitely not the electric back from Crewe. You select to do that scenario and the loco numbers for those four trains are filled in and that is your evening move for that day. (You would be told what you would have got had you chosen one of the other options just to wind you up!) That’s my current thinking but I may have to look at creating the evening midweek timetable from scratch if I can’t make something work that looks reasonable.

Sunday moves/drags
This is more problematical that midweek moves because I have to assume a player might want to do a Saturday/Sunday overnight to cover Crewe drags and certainly the Birmingham - Nuneaton drags on a Sunday where 56s would be used. In the game the only time 56s are likely to appear is on a Sunday drag, but they are available for failures or specials. You will need everyone that works the drags so I’ll have to add them to the game. I’ll look at what happened in reality and see if I can create a ’scenario’ out of this rather than create individual trains and a timetable. The biggest problem for me arises on a Sunday afternoon when there would be a whole host of options available depending what is known or seen to be working. I’ve not yet thought that through.

Top Men
I know when people play Hellfire! they run the game to accumulate mileage off there favourite locos or repeat the year to clear a whole class. As this game only has 18 Summer Saturdays I didn’t intend to offer that option but it will be an option so you can just go after miles off 40s, 31s, 25s and get a reasonable ranking result but the game is intended to be one for new engines, not miles or rare track. (I’m planning to give points for each loco over 100 miles or 1000 if you can get there but I’ll need to balance that against the value you get from a new engine). In the game there will be two opponents that will score every loco they need that they know is working, no matter how implausible that might seem. We used to joke about how certain people would just appear for their new engines and then just disappear once they had them. They were part of the ITKB, real Top Men, who would be told where their new engines were each day. I mirror that in the game by creating two ficticious players with different requirements lists that are much less than what you need. You will need the same as they do plus a lot more and you have get to the locos you need. Your advantage is that they only score from the KNOWN planned gen, Saturdays, Sundays and midweek moves. They don’t get the chance to pick up failures or those rare locos that just appear at the last minute. I expect the grading of players will be on the basis of how far behind the Top Men they are. Say at 95% of their points you would also be called a Top Man but at 90% you would be a Main Man and so on down to 50% being an Insect. The needs list of the game’s Top Men does not relate to what the real people, whose names you might confuse with those used in the game, would have needed in 1980 neither does it imply that they fudged their moves! I simply don’t want to add complexity into the program to try to calculate for the computer players what moves they would need to do to get their new engines.

What computers will it run on?
My original game was written in the computer language know as Basic. The program I am writing now is also in Basic but one that can run on Windows systems. In 2026 I found out that the computer language I am using has been discontinued so I may have to rewrite it in another language! More delay I fear but I am hoping the use of AI will enable me to more easily convert to another language today than it was in the 1990s. So my plan is to make a Windows version then a MacOS version (especially as I am a Mac not Windows user in real life). Then if time permits, I’ll see if I can get it to run on a phone. To tell you the truth I have no idea whether that is possible but I’ll worry about it when I have completed the first two stages.

Your thoughts
I am open to listening and responding to your ideas. You can contact me at ideas@railrover80.co.uk or message me via Facebook, etc. I may not be able to include your suggestions.