Choo! Choo! Driving the Southern Belle

Southern Belle, from Hewson Consultants in 1985, puts you on the footplate of a steam locomotive hauling the Southern Belle express over the 50¾ miles from London Victoria to Brighton. You look out from the cab along the line, past the stations, tunnels and signals of the real route, and drive to a timetable with the regulator, cut-off and brake. At the end an inspector marks you on economy, timekeeping and safety.

There is no manual in our library, so everything here comes from driving it in MAME with the library's Southern Belle disc. This guide takes you from Victoria to a pass mark at Brighton.

Loading

The disc starts by itself. When it shows Press ENTER on grey screen!, press ENTER. The game takes about a minute to load, and then drives a demonstration run with PRESS X FOR MENU scrolling along the bottom. Press X.

Choosing a run

Each run has its own timetable and notices, which the game shows before you start:

The notices add speed limits and warnings to some of them: a temporary 30 mph limit for permanent way work, a new signal at Coulsdon North, and a reminder that wheel slip may damage the track. ENTER on the menu starts a High Speed Run instead. This guide uses 1, the Training Run.

Next the game asks how much of the engine you want to drive:

At level 1 you drive and the fireman does the rest. Each level up hands you another job. Press 1, and the timetable appears:

Your times at these ten places are what the inspector checks. Press ENTER for the cab.

The cab

• Above the view, the name board shows the station or tunnel you are at or passing.
• The red panel shows water and coal left in the tender, and your speed in mph.
• The pink panel shows the signals as you come to them, and the position or the gradient when you ask for them.
• The clock gives the time, which is what your timetable is measured against.
• On the backhead, the regulator handle is at the top left, and the small dials carry the letters of the keys that work them: C for the cut-off and V for the vacuum brake, among others.

The keys

At level 1 three controls are yours. Each press moves a control one notch, from 0 up to 4. Holding a key down does not repeat it, so press again for the next notch. To move a control the other way, hold DEL while you press its key. In MAME, DEL is your Backspace key.

These work at any level:

At the higher levels more keys come into play: B for the blower, I for the injector and F and D for the fire at level 5, each one turned back down with DEL. We drove only at level 1.

Getting away

1. Press C four times. The C dial turns round to full cut-off, as the demonstration run does before it starts.
2. Press R once or twice to open the regulator.

After a few moments the train moves off. Do not open the regulator more than two notches at a stand. At three or four notches the train stayed exactly where it was, for as long as we waited.

Once you are doing about 15 mph, open the regulator the rest of the way with two more presses of R. When you are over 25 mph, hold DEL and press C twice to bring the cut-off back to two notches. Like this, the train ran up to around 70 mph on the faster parts of the line.

Stopping at Brighton

Brighton is 50¾ miles out, and the platforms are inside the station's train shed, where the line ends at the buffers.

1. Slow down well before the end. From about 48 miles, close the regulator (DEL and R) and put the brake on a notch at a time with V. Take it off again with DEL and V if you slow too much. Aim to be almost stopped as P shows Brighton coming up.
2. Stop just short of the station, then creep in. Brake off (DEL and V), open the regulator one notch, and let the train roll into the shed at about 10 mph.
3. Stop in the shed. Once you are well inside, close the regulator and press V twice. With FAST on, we did this 13 to 15 seconds after starting to creep. Two notches are enough; we put on four once and it went down as EM Brakes at BRIGHTON, an emergency application.

When the train stands in the shed, ARRIVAL AT BRIGHTON scrolls along the bottom and GAME OVER PRESS A appears. Keep rolling instead, and you hit the buffers:

The game has other endings we did not meet, among them running the boiler dry, overfilling it, overrunning a stop signal, derailing and a blowback that incapacitates the crew.

The inspector's assessment

Press A. The timetable returns with all your times, and the inspector's marks:

This was a run with the regulator wide open all the way, arriving everywhere early. From the program itself, and matching every run we made, the marks work like this:

• Economy is what you have left: up to 48 marks for coal, full marks with 3 or more still in the tender, and up to 52 marks for water, full marks with about 3 or more.
• Timekeeping starts at 100 and loses 2 marks for every minute you are early or late at each of the ten places on the timetable. Early counts just as much as late. Our run was 20 minutes out in total, hence 60%.
• Safety starts at 100 and loses marks for incidents. Ours came to 95% every time.
• The result is the average of the three, and 70% is a pass.

So the way to a better mark is to drive to the timetable, not flat out. At level 1 there is a catch: the fireman keeps the fire going automatically, and in our runs used up nearly all 24 coal by Brighton whatever we did, which holds Economy down. Driving closer to time, we reached 88% for Timekeeping, but finished with no coal. Taking over the firing at a higher level is the way to save coal, and we have not tried it yet.

Quick reference

If you drove the Southern Belle back in the day, or have its manual, we would like to hear from you. The contact form is at tatungbytes.co.uk/contact.