In the early 1980s I was travelling on a train with some of my friends from the "8/9 Roadshow”, those being the guys I would meet in the evenings at Birmingham New Street station. On the table in front of them was an A3 sheet of paper with some railway routes drawn in and pieces of paper, representing locomotives, that moved along them based on a dice throw. I can’t remember any of the rules or how a winner was decided but the name of this game was ‘Bashopoly’. It is this game we have to thank for the computer games that followed, first “Rail Rover”, then “Scottish Rover”, “Hellfire!” and now "Railrover80".

I’m Alan Baylis and my work in the 1980s was supporting mainframe computing for the Central Electricity Generating Board. I had become an expert in Basic programming and in 1979 won the Practical Computing Game of the Year prize for my program based on the Amerrican election. As I watched my friends play ‘Bashopoly” an idea formed in my mind, could I write a game based on our shared hobby of 'bashing’? It would take me some years to complete and whilst the actual dates are long forgotten, the game “Rail Rover” was originally for PCs running the MS-DOS operating system and could fit on a single 5 1/4 inch foppy disk. I based it on the 1980 train timetable and the amendments for that year but it would probably have been '82 before I started work on it. There were two key sources of information at that time. Ken Howard’s 1H80 listed all the locomotive hauled trains and Ed Lund’s SO 1980 listed what had worked many of the Summer Saturday trains that year so you could see which trains were getting the rare locos. 1H80 enabled me to identify the trains in the timetable which were loco hauled and those which were not (ie DMU/EMU and HST). In that game there were about 800 loco hauled trains and twice that number for the rest. I had 120 stations and the area covered was from Oxford/Gloucester/Church Stretton in the south to Preston/Darlington in the north with most coastal lines in between. I was limited by the amount of memory in the computers of the late 80s and by what could be stored on 5 1/4 disks and subsequently 3 1/2inch disks. It is hard to imagine nowadays but those disks could only hold 360kB of data so that meant “Rail Rover” had to be written so that it would fit on one, maybe two, disks, ie much less that 1MB. By the end of the 80s I finally had working MS-DOS version and it proved to be popular. For two years I ran a weekend event where three friends and I would get together and play all 18 turns over one weekend. I never won, it was either Justin Wickens or a guy from Southampton (whose name I have forgotten!) who won them.

MS-DOS effectively came to an end in the mid 90s after which Windows 95 etc took over. "Rail Rover" could no longer be run and I lost interest in converting it to run on that opoerating system. However one of the people who had played "Rail Rover" asked if he could have the source code and data to do that. His name was Michael Wright. Mike took what I had done and converted it to run in Visual Basic and then developed it further switching it from its Midland based routes to become “Scottish Rover”. This was released in the early 2000’s and rekindled the interest in railway haulage games. Mike didn’t stop there and had the idea to build a simulation covering the entire railway network based on the complete summer/winter 1981 timetable! Both computer and storage were no longer limiting factors but the complexity of the data significantly increases so he rewrote the underlying program to produce the game we know as “Hellfire!”. That will have taken him years of effort and he continues to improve on that with ideas and suggestions from the game's players. That is without doubt the best game of its type for railway haulage enthusiasts and will continue to be so even after I have completed "Railrover80".

I always hoped to revisit my version of “Rail Rover” one day. 1980 holds a special place in my heart as it was the year I scored the most New Engines. I put off looking at a rewrite until I had retired from work at which time I then got married so that meant further delay! In 2024 I was finally ready to start work when catastrophy struck, the hard disk which had the game on it failed, literally only a few days before I was ready. I looked for a backup copy but in the way these things happen, I had a backup of all the other drives but not that one. I had actually made a DVD backup of that drive but then forgotten that was what I had done and I had thrown those DVDs away when moving house. It looked like the game was gone for good because no one would have kept a copy of something that couldn’t be run under Windows. Well no one except Mike that is because when I turned to him for help he sent me the copy of “Rail Rover” he had originally converted to Visual Basic, all my data files were there and some, but not all, of the program. I had enough to build on and started work in mid 2025. I expect it will be early 2027 before I have a working version of “Railrover80” to share with you but without Mike’s help there would be nothing and my heartfelt thanks goes out to him for saving those files.