SIDINGS

A single line, a winter timetable, and one train at a time.

Every other train game asks you to make the railway bigger. This one is about the thing that actually decides what a railway can carry: a single track holds one train at a time.

You are the signalman on a branch that climbs from Lowgarth to High Fell. Trains come up the valley and down it on a timetable that does not care whether you are ready. Two trains in one block section is not a setback. It is a wreck.

Your capacity is not your mileage. It is your signalling — and you buy it one layer at a time, up the same ladder the real Victorian railways climbed for exactly the same reason.

One Engine In Steam → Automatic Route Setting

Seven rungs, in the real order. Each one automates the job the last one made you do by hand, and opens a timetable the last one could not have carried.

• Staff & Ticket — a wooden staff guards each section, and it travels on the train. Until something comes back the other way, that section is one way only. You will feel this one.
• Electric Token — the staff stops having to ride home.
• Absolute Block — bells and instruments between every box.
• Track Circuits — the rails themselves report. Until you own this, a train inside a section is genuinely invisible to you: the panel knows the section is occupied and nothing more.
• Interlocking Frame — the levers lock against each other. A signal that would put two trains in one section can no longer be pulled, however tired you are.
• Automatic Route Setting — the panel reads the timetable and sets the road itself.

A loop has a length

Two trains going opposite ways can only pass where there is a loop, and a loop has a length. A nine-wagon mineral train does not fit in a four-carriage loop, and there is no partial credit for being close. So "where can these two cross?" is a question about geometry you paid for, and the answer changes the moment you take a freight contract. Buy the loops before you buy the traffic.

Snow

Snow builds on the exposed sections, slows trains, and eventually closes a section outright, taking away capacity you already paid for. Order the plough.

Losing costs you the day, never the railway

A wreck or a blocked line ends the day. Every yard of track and every instrument you have ever bought stays exactly where it is, and tomorrow's timetable is already waiting. It saves itself after every day; close the tab and come back.

Winning

Work the Winter Timetable: a full day of the heaviest traffic on the line, by hand, on a fully interlocked frame, with the Mail and the mineral trains running, without putting two trains in one section.

Free, plays in the browser, no account, no ads, no tracking, and no network calls of any kind. The source ships unminified inside the download if you would like to read it.

Mouse and keyboard. Space pause · 1 2 4 speed · S shunt · M mute · H help.

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