TRAIN ORDERS · a free railroad strategy game for people who want an exact score · one track, three days

Nothing on this railroad can crash. The question is who waits.

You're the dispatcher on a single-track branch. Trains run both ways on one line of rail, and they can only pass where there's a siding. Before the first train moves, you write where each pair meets. Then you sign, and the day runs your orders exactly.

Move the meet Play all three days

Free. No account, no ads. The first two days play right here, on a phone too.

The TRAIN ORDERS sheet for MONDAY: No. 1, the morning passenger, standing 27 minutes in the CALLOW siding as a thick red bar, and the delay ledger reading 81.
MONDAY as the timetable wrote it. The thick red bar is the morning passenger, standing 27 minutes in a siding.

Move one meet. 81 dispatcher's minutes become 18.

The timetable was written for a day when everything ran on time. This is MONDAY, the game's first day, running on the game's own engine. No. 2 is 40 minutes late. The timetable still meets her at CALLOW, so the morning passenger sits in the siding and waits. Move the meet one station east and watch the ledger.

That's 81 dispatcher's minutes down to 18, with one order. A passenger minute costs three and a freight minute costs one, so sometimes the right call is to make the freight wait.

TUESDAY loads when you finish. Four trains, five orders, an extra with no timetable rights, and a risk card. The hot box rolls off today's date, the same roll the full game makes, so if it fires here it fires there.

Hollis's lines are the game's. The demo swaps key names for buttons (▼ east instead of ↓), and it fixes one TUESDAY line that names the wrong stretch of track (the game's copy says DUNMORE and CALLOW; the risk card and the engine say ELLERY and DUNMORE). Everything else is the game's text and the game's code.

How to read the sheet

It's a string diagram: the day drawn as lines, the way timetable planners sketched it. (A real dispatcher's train sheet was mostly columns of times.)

  • Time runs left to right. Stations run top to bottom, west at the top.
  • Each train is a line. Steep is fast. Flat is standing still.
  • A thick flat bar is someone waiting. Red is a passenger (3 a minute), blue a freight (1), green an extra (1).
  • Where two lines come together at a station, that's a meet. ▲ and ▼ slide it to the next siding west or east.

That's basically it. Move one order and the whole day redraws.

The same MONDAY sheet after moving the meet to DUNMORE: the red bar is gone, a short blue bar shows the freight waiting 18 minutes, and the ledger matches par at 18.
One press later. The freight waits instead, at a third of the price.

The whole rulebook is five lines

You don't have to memorize them. The engine enforces them, and when your orders would break the day, the refusal says which train is stuck and why.

  1. MEET. Neither train leaves the meet station until the other has arrived.
  2. PASS. The slow train doesn't leave until the fast one has.
  3. BLOCK. One train between two stations at a time.
  4. TRACKS. Nobody heads for a station with every track taken.
  5. TIME. Nobody leaves the terminal before their time, plus today's lateness.

Every eastbound and westbound pair has to have a meet. That's why nothing can crash: there's no way to write two trains onto the same rail at once. What you can write is a sheet that locks the line, everybody standing and waiting on somebody else. The game won't sign that. It refuses and names names:

The sheet won't sign: these orders lock the line: No. 1 waits at DUNMORE: every track at ELLERY is taken; No. 4 waits at GARTH: every track at ELLERY is taken; …

That's WEDNESDAY's timetable, word for word from the game.

Is it luck? Random sheets that sign earn ★★★ 1 time in 300.

Fair question, since TUESDAY has a hot box. No. 4's lead car ran warm at FENWICK, and the risk card prints the odds: 1 in 2 she stands 20 to 45 minutes somewhere between ELLERY and DUNMORE.

Three things keep that honest. You sign before you know, and so does the chief: his sheet (par) came from a search over every hot-box length the card allows, and it never sees today's roll. Then your minutes are compared to his sheet run against the same box you got. And before anything signs, the game runs your orders through every one of those hot-box worlds. If any of them locks the line, it won't sign.

If the box does fire, you get one Form 19: a single re-order, only for trains still short of the new station. One leak: the box is keyed to the date, so the second time you run a day, you know what it'll do. The chief never gets a second look.

Here's what the proof suite says. It ships with the game (npm run sim).

TUESDAY WEDNESDAY
Random order sheets that sign 189 of 400 69 of 400
Random signable sheets at ★★★ 1 of 300 0 of 300
When the box fires, the best Form 19 saves 10+ minutes on a random signable sheet 79 of 120 82 of 120
Collisions, 400 random sheets in every hot-box world 0 0

So random orders sign about half the time on TUESDAY and almost never earn three stars. The only catch: par isn't proved perfect. It's the best sheet a 40-restart search found. Match it and you get ★★★. Beat it and you get the same three stars and the right to be smug.

Three days on the Callow Branch

  • MONDAY, the late freight. One order. Hollis talks you through it. 81 down to 18.
  • TUESDAY, the hot box. Extra 51 is a livestock train the timetable doesn't know about, so left alone she sits at ASHTON for 193 minutes. DUNMORE has no siding, the passenger has to get around her, and No. 4 might run hot.
  • WEDNESDAY, the full sheet. Five trains, eight orders, and a bridge gang holding DUNMORE to ELLERY at half speed. The timetable's own sheet won't sign. You start from a locked line.

Every day ends at the superintendent's sheet: your minutes, the chief's par, and the chief's orders drawn on your sheet as grey dots.

What's real, what isn't, and the honest gripes

The words come from the desk: meet, siding, extra, hot box, train order, string diagram. The rules don't. There's no timetable superiority here: every meet is a written order that holds both trains, and class sets the price of a minute and breaks ties. Five rules is a game. A real dispatcher had a book of them, operators repeating every order back, and no undo button. The game's Form 19 is its own rule too. A real one could be handed up to a moving train. Mine stops the clock while you write it.

Honest gripes:

  • It's three days. A slice, not a career.
  • The full game needs a keyboard. On a phone the first two days play on this page, but /play/ won't start.
  • Labels can pile up when two trains stand at one station.
  • No music. The sound effects are generated in code and nobody has really listened to them yet.
  • Nobody has played it except me and my test scripts. No reviews, no play times.

Questions

Can I crash the trains?
No. The sheet won't sign anything that puts two trains in one block or locks the line, in any hot-box world the card allows.
Do I need to know about railroads?
No. The ledger tells you what every order costs before you sign it.
How long does it take?
I don't have play times yet. MONDAY is one move, and once you sign, the day runs in about 20 seconds. TUESDAY and WEDNESDAY run a minute or so each, less if you hurry them. The planning is the part I can't time.
What's a hot box?
An overheated wheel bearing. On this branch it means No. 4 stops and stands, and you find out for how long when it happens.
Does it work on a phone?
MONDAY and TUESDAY do, right here. The full game needs a keyboard.
Is it really free?
Yes. No account, no ads, nothing to buy. Your stars save in your browser.

WEDNESDAY won't sign

That's where the game starts for real. The timetable locks the line at ELLERY, the refusal tells you who's stuck, and you write your way out. Finish TUESDAY above and the full game opens with WEDNESDAY picked.

Start with MONDAY Play all three days

P.S. If you do one thing, make the first move. One order, 81 dispatcher's minutes down to 18. If that doesn't make you curious about TUESDAY, the rest won't either.