I love the railways, I really do, but these pure-BASIC text-only games where you issue instructions to move a pre-coded selection of locomotives around the various sidings of a maintainence depot just leave me cold.
The location for this game is the Finsbury Park Traction Maintainence Depot (TMD), North London, but for all I care it might as well be Ipswich Engine Shed.
To be fair, some people somewhere might've burned the midnight oil playing this one and had a whale of a time, in the same way that I can never go to bed once I've started a game of Civilization 2. If that's true then I salute whoever you are and invite you to create a good review of this title, to counterbalance my negative review!
Alas, Finsbury Park TMD is no more. The site was closed in 1983, then demolished, the tracks lifted and apartments now cover the area, just to the south-west of present-day Finsbury Park station.
On a personal level, as much as I lament the loss of railway infrastructure, I understand this was done for a good reason in this case - to stop more games like this from being produced. ;)
Anyway the game does contain one fatal bug. After all of the player's efforts in shunting the locomotives around the depot, the score they get awarded on the screen at the end of the game can be completely incorrect. And I quote:-
2607 LET z$="DISASTROUS": IF sc>95 THEN LET z$="Poor": IF sc>60 THEN LET z$="Average": IF sc>70 THEN LET z$="Good"
For those who realy want to play this game, "IF sc>95" should be replaced with "IF sc>50" or you will never be able to obtain a score of "Poor" (which at least is one level above "Disastrous").
