| Microsoft eat your
heart out. You can't compete with this one. It covers the
1950's/1960's, the Pre grouping eras, to 1923 or to
1948, many Heritage lines, including Narrow Gauge. No two runs are ever alike.
So you can try Cardean from Glasgow to Carlisle, A Castle on the
1950's Bristolian, a D49 4-4-0 to Scarborough, a Double Fairlie out of
Porthmadog, a K1 on the North York Moors, and a Schools to Portsmouth
Harbour in the mid 1930's, and many more. At the last count there were
over 800 individual simulations to chose from, and your driving skills can be
assessed by calling up or printing a journey log file.
All of this is the work of two individuals. It's instigator was the infamous David Bailey, who features regularly in the pages of this website. The setting up of the many hundreds of route, gradient, signal, log, event, and loco files was the fault of your webmaster. |
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| It started thus.
In the days of Sinclair ZX and Commodore 64's, David had attempted to
write a computer program which simulated the performance of his
favourite locomotives, namely Duchess of Hamilton, and Black 5 no 5305,
on the Appleby to Ais Gill section of the Settle and Carlisle line. Then
for a while, nothing seemed to happen. But in July 1991 the postman
delivered a parcel. Inside was lots of padding, three of the old large
size floppy discs, and an extremely long letter, containing many pages
of instructions.
This was the dos version 1 of the David Bailey driving simulator. No longer just Appleby to Ais Gill, but anywhere, providing information was available on route mileages, gradients, speed restrictions, and a rough idea of signal distances and configurations. It was a "Do it yourself" simulator. With my interest in train timing and locomotive performance, I was the obvious person to be the "test bed". |
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| In the early stages, being something of a computer dunce, I found setting up the required files difficult, and there were regular exchanges of post. Things speeded up when I took early retirement in 1995. By 1998, I had exhausted all of the information I had at my disposal. In fact most of the uk main and secondary lines are covered, and a considerable number of branch lines. So I could even drive an M7 tank along my favourite branch line, the Otter Valley line from Tipton St Johns to Exmouth. Both ways of course. | ||||
| But Microsoft had already dealt a fatal blow. Windows! With the demise of the dos operating system, and it's replacement firstly with the dreadful Windows 3.1, and then the progressively less dreadful 95,98 2000 etc, then the program and all of the associated files would need completely re-writing. So the project was effectively abandoned. | ||||
| The image above shows a screenshot of a typical simulation. It is King class 4-6-0 no 6001, a Stafford Road (84A) engine, about to depart from Paddington on the 9 coach 11.10am service to Birkenhead. The simulation will end at Birmingham Snow Hill. In the mid 1950's the 11.10am was a 9 coach train and had a 87 minute schedule to Leamington Spa, 87.3 miles. I haven't yet succeeded in arriving on time. But in real life, the 11.10am never ran to time, at least I never saw it do so. |
