One-Track Mind

The first train simulator program I bought was called Microsoft Train Simulator, known as MSTS. I have always wondered where the extra S came from. It was a serious simulator, and one of the things it didn't like you doing was laying a circle of track. If you insisted on trying to build a model railway you had to get very devious with the turnouts to try and hide the fact that at some point the line was going to form a loop. And something else that didn't work in MSTS were turntables. Not only did the program object to track joining up to make a circle, it objected to track that could be broken. Was there logic behind that? I never knew.

At about the same time, I bought another train simulator program, Trainz. Don't you just stagger in admiration at the genius of someone who can replace an S with a Z? Trainz, produced by a company called Auran, is known as TRS2004, although recently they have brought out TRS2006, and going backwards in time to before I bought my version, there was something called UTC, and at this point I'm going to stop enumerating.

Trainz allowed you to lay a circle of track, in fact it seemed to expect you to want to do that. It also had working turntables, swing-bridges, lifting bridges, all the quirky things that made railways the fascinating things that they are. And you could flit from train to train like a passenger trying to use the fragmented British train operating companies to get somewhere; I discovered this almost by accident, driving one of the steam engines that pulled a train full of logs to a sawmill where the logs were magically unloaded into a heap on the ground beside the track and the other wagons filled up with woodchips as you crawled slowly through the factory complex. I passed a set of sidings where there was a second engine hissing quietly, with some carriages coupled up behind it. I thought it looked inviting, so I clicked on it with the mouse, and instantly I was in the cab of the new engine, looking out at the train full of woodchips steaming off away from me.

The initial panic of being left behind passed when I found I could operate the controls of the engine I had hopped onto. I sounded the whistle and set off along the line, wondering where I might end up. After a while I passed a mill in the woods with a train hauling trucks full of logs to be unloaded and more trucks to be filled up with woodchips. After a while longer, with the landscape starting to look familiar, I passed the same mill again, this time without the train. I could go round and round in circles, playing trains, without having to worry about the line suddenly coming to an end and my needing to bang on the emergency brakes.

The next discovery was that Trainz had 'drivers', artificial intelligence agencies to whom you could give instructions to save you doing the mundane tasks of running round the train yourself or finding the way from Upper LumberjackWoods to Lower Pansycreek. I could sit back and watch as driver one drove the train I was riding, while up in the woods driver two was circling around between logging camp and wood mill. It was all I ever wanted from the game; I didn't want to be an engine driver, I was happy being the Fat Controller, a perpetual passenger. 'Drive', I would instruct as I boarded the train. 'Copy that', would come the response from the speakers, and the train would set off, driving at the varying speed limits, while I tagged along watching the landscape flow past me.

I began to notice that the AI drivers were not infallible. Sometimes they would take a rather circuitous route between two points that I thought could have been reached by a shorter path. One of them would often come to a complete halt and sit there immobile, and I would have to intervene, taking the controls and getting the train back into motion. Sadly, there was no way to interrogate him to work out why he had come to a halt. So I searched around the net and found that someone had written an Inspector program. I downloaded it, and waited until this particular driver halted, then sent in the Inspector and awaited his report.

I should have known it right from the start; why would a slim young driver like that wander on board with such an enormous lunch satchel? It wasn't food he carried around with him to while away the boredom in the cab. His bag was stuffed full of porn. "He was reading 'Rubber Nurses Enema Revenge' while he waited for the signal to go to green", the Inspector reported, "and he seemed to have become engrossed in the plot and hadn't noticed the signal wasn't for his line at all."

I'm sure there ought to be an apostrophe in that title somewhere.