What is Railrover80?
Railrover80 is a game based on the hobby of ‘railway bashing’ in 1980, that being the pursuit of locomotives hauling passenger trains. The idea is that you don’t just have top see the locomotive (a.k.a. trainspotting), you have to travel on a train hauled or pushed by that locomotive to count it. This is a far cry from the railways of today where locomotive hauled trains are few and far between. You can play the game either as a NED (New Engine Desparado) or as a particular loco class Mileage Man and you score points for travelling on ’new engines’ or accumulating mileage off locomotive hauled trains. Your aim is to become known as a Top Man but you only have the eighteen Summer weeks of 1980 in which to do that
If you have played the game Hellfire! then you will know most of what I am about to say. This 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. This is the area that you would have most likely been operating in on a Summer Saturday. Only loco hauled trains score points in the game and you get them because the loco is new to you, ie you have never been hauled by them or 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. (Class 43s, the HST locomotives weren’t yet a thing in 1980). The aim of the game is to get enough points to be called a “Top Man” which you can do by getting the rarest locomotives, accumulating miles off classes that are 'well liked’ or accumulating bonus points for getting 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 (or go to school) during the day!
To help you know where the locos you need are there are a number of stations are known as Gen Centres and from 0700 hrs on Saturday morning these will start to report on what is likely to be working the important trains in their area. (The most famous of these is Sheffield where Neil Webster would stand on Platform Five calling out the train headcodes and their allocated locomotives, Birmingham had Brian Winters doing similar). 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 catch too many trains overnight you increase the risk of falling asleep on the train and missing the station where you wanted to debark.
You can select your starting grade and your initial locomotive requirements will be 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, a Main Man and a Top Man respectively. Unless you are playing at their grade then 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). Your rating depends on doing better than them each week, close the points gap and raise your rank so your mates no longer look on you as being “a bit of a clown” or “a buffoon”. You will have to keep going each day until you have got the last drop out of that day’s action.