The Railwayman's Handbook

Welcome, Stationmaster. You begin in 1830 with 60 coins and a bare table. Over the next century and a bit you will lay track, run a train, raise homes and workplaces beside the line, and try to climb the ladder of British honours from Stationmaster all the way to The Railway King.

Every figure in this handbook — costs, fares, targets, dividends — is the game's own: the same arithmetic the board runs on you each year. Learn it, and the century stops being a mystery.

A running line on the table in passthrough AR The real app: your layout sits on your actual table, the train runs the loop, and the board grades you each year.

How you win

Your score is net worth — coins + the book value of everything you've built − debt — and the campaign is a race up a ladder of seven ranks:

The clock is the in-game calendar. A competent player who keeps building reaches Railway King around the year 2000; an aggressive optimiser gets there earlier; a line that stops building never makes it at all. The earlier your coronation, the better your run.

The core loop

Every game is the same engine underneath:

1. Lay your track. The engine sets off on its own as soon as the rails form a line, and it'll even roll on empty track (it just won't earn until there are passengers). A closed loop runs best: the train circles it nonstop at full speed, while an open line is slower — it shuttles back and forth, reversing at each dead end.
2. Raise homes and workplaces within 2 cells of your stations. Homes supply commuters; workplaces and parks give them somewhere to go. Trips are fares.
3. Each fiscal year the board grades you on your operating ratio (running costs ÷ fare income). Beat it and you draw a dividend; miss it and you get nothing.
4. Costs rise over the century (unionisation, nationalisation, the oil crisis) while fares never inflate. A line that stops growing is slowly overtaken and bleeds out.
5. Reinvest dividends and fares into denser buildings, a bigger train, more land — and climb the ladder before the cost treadmill catches you.

That last point is the whole game in one sentence: a static railway is designed to die. The chapters that follow are about how to outgrow the treadmill instead of coasting into it.

The century at a glance

Time speeds up as you go — early years crawl, later years fly by:

The free demo plays the whole Steam Age and gates at the boundary into 1855.

Read on for the board's requirement — the operating ratio — and exactly how to beat it.