If you have played Hellfire! then you will know most of what I am about to say. The game uses the actual railway timetable from Summer 1980 and includes all the locomotive hauled trains that run in the area betweeen Carlisle and Newcastle in the North to Hereford, Gloucester, Oxford, Bletchley and Bedford in the South. These are the trains that score points in the game, either because they are new to you, ie you have never been hauled by them or because you get points for the miles you rack up travelling on loco hauled trains. There are three times as many non-loco hauled trains in the game, the HSTs, DMUs and EMUs which you may need to travel on to get to places where a required loco hauled train is working but you score no points for these. The aim of the game is to get enough points to be called a “Top Man” and you can do that by getting the rarest locomotives, accumulating miles off classes that are 'well liked’ or clearing all the locomotives of a particular class or sub-class.

The game lasts for 18 Summer Saturdays, those being from May to September and all the days in between. However you only play Saturday with the 24hr train timetable, Sunday and weekdays have a different gameplay in that you select moves from a list of option scenarios and then the loco numbers are filled in. The idea is to speed up the gameplay between the Saturdays but also give a realistic set of locos rather than just random numbers. Mid-week moves are also based on "evenings only” because in the real world you would have to work for a living during the day! (I explain more of about this in the Progress section of the website).

To help you know where the locos you need are a number of stations are known as Gen Centres and from 0700 hrs on Saturday morning will start to report on what is likely to be working the important trains in their area. You then take trains across the network to pursue those you need or want haulage off. You are not restricted to historical railrover ticket boundaries, you have “validity” to go anywhere but if you do too many moves overnight then you increase the chance of falling asleep and missing the station where you wanted to debark.

Your initial locomotive requirements are based on what an average enthusiast would require in 1980, ie quite a lot! Your performance is measured against two of the greats of the era, who I have called Tony Mustard and Paul Bowman. Their needs lists are much less than yours because they are the “Top Men” of that era. You are unlikely to catch them up because they have the knack of scoring every required loco they know about thanks either by the possession of a Tardis or a helicopter (the game doesn’t make that distinction). However your rating depends on doing better than them each week, close the gap and raise your rank so your mates no longer think you are “a bit of a clown” or “a buffoon”. You have to keep going each day until you have got to the last drop of that day’s action.