August update:
Now looking at all the other information displays such as the gen sheets, required locos working and so on. I have created a list showing distances between stations to the nearest 1/4 mile. I used David Maxey’s "Miles and Chains” book as the source for this and could have used accurate fractional mileages but deliberately chose not to. My memory of 1980 was that we used timetable mileages as more accurate distances had not yet found their way into the hands of most enthusiasts. (I also expect some of my maths might be a little inaccurate so even more like the 80s then!) Next on my list was the the grid coordinates for all stations in the game which are needed to calculate distance for the walk/bus/taxi moves. Google AI provided the lot in less than a day and that has been added to the station database. In the game taking a taxi will cost no points (Top Men don’t care about cost, etc, etc) but will be limited to less than 55 miles (Taxi drivers don’t care that you need to get that new engine if it leaves them miles from their work area). I am including a dropdown box to show the list of stations you can go to from the station you are at with estimated travel times. Expected game completion date is October (this year!).

July update:
Completed the game displays seen by the player when at a station or on a train. I tested for ‘worst case’ train failures to confirm the messages are correctly formatted for display.

June update:
Created the game 'start screen’ and the player name and options selections. It includes starting with a ranking from Insect to Top Man and scenarios for NED or Class xx Mileage Man but I will only be testing the NED for the initial release. There is a requirements and mileage list for the five player ratings from Top Man to Insect. A players ranking will be based on a percentage of the ‘Top Man’’s 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 DMUs etc 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 expect to provide variants that allow people to focus on just doing, say, class 40s and get a competitive score. (Double or tripple points for mileage or new engines from your chosen class?). 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.

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. There is a small (1%) chance that something ‘exotic’ might work the trains so a 1,000,000 to 1 chance that all trains out of Skegness are pairs of 20s!

I am 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. I will put them in the game but they won’t score highly because we tended to overlook them in the 1980s as we saw you could never get them all. I’ll probably have a pool of five locos for each location that can be picked from and the same loco will be at that station for several weeks in a row.

Lickey Bankers
Apart from the booked Glasgow sleeper train these will work all failures that occur to northbound trains between Cheltenham and Birmingham. The chance that you will be on such a train is remote but you may see them arrive at Birmingham where the man with gloves will detach them from the train! However you can get the bankers by doing S19 at the end of Saturday’s moves. My intention is to allow you to do S19 midweek as historically that was when I went for them and that will mean you do 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 with 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
My diary shows 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 if I had wanted that then I would have written to Mike to ask him for the data structure and then create a 1980 version of Hellfire! using his program. That would take me several years to set up but I don’t want that level of detail. In this game midweek moves will initially assume you are based in Birmingham and can only get to New Street for 1730 each day because of your job or school. (I will expand this to other starting points if it proves to be a success). For the game release the Sunday and Mid-week moves will be predetermined so you see the outcome but have no means to change them. I will then start work on creating actual train records for these days, you would be told what locos were known or planned to be working (ie evening gen when you get to the station), such as the Skeg 20s, the Lickey Bankers and so on but there would be still be gaps in that. You can then decide what to go for just like a Saturday but the day only lasts for four hours! There will be a few specific rules to allow you to cover M42, the morning train from Worcester which produced interesting power, a couple of times a week and not the day after you go for the Bankers on S19. (You get home too late and can’t get up early enough for that train).

Sunday moves/drags
This is more problematical for me than midweek moves because 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 have to add them to the game. I’ll create individual trains and a timetable for a subsequent version of the game but for now Sunday will be a set of preset moves. The biggest problem in this would arise on a Sunday afternoon when there would be a whole host of options available depending what is known or seen to be working. I’ll have to leave that for a later release.

Top Men
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 don’t expect to be clearing freight loco classes for haulage! There 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 track. (I’m planning to give extra points for each loco over 100 miles or 1000 if you can get one there). In the game you will have two opponents who will be scoring 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 yours. 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 but I may not be able to include all your suggestions!