Scope: the tarot-sized Mainline cards placed between Offices — how the deck is dealt, what a card does to a train crossing it, and the Home Deck cards played onto one.
The card table in this document is GENERATED from
src/engine/content.tsand checked by a test, so it cannot disagree with the game.npm run build:cardsrebuilds it; do not edit it by hand. The prose explains how the deck is used; the table is the record of what is in it.
At setup the game lays one Mainline card between each neighbouring pair of Offices and one beyond each end Office, between it and a Division Point — so a game with N players uses N + 1 cards. They are dealt from a finite deck without replacement, so no Division can hold two of a card printed once. The two Division Points are the fixed ends of the Division and are not in the deck: buildDivision lays them itself.
A card does not belong to either neighbouring Office. It is shared Division.
A card is divided into regions, and a train advances one region per Stage. Crossing time is therefore regions − startRegion, and nothing else. The printed mph is scenery.
This is the part most likely to be remembered wrong. The printed mph does not set the cost and a Slow train added a Stage to every card. It does not. Four things move a train's start region and nothing else does:
No crossing ever takes less than one Stage.
Only Double Track lets two trains stand on one card, so a following train is not held behind a slower one. Every other card holds one train at a time. The Uncontrolled Siding is not a passing card: arriving to find a train already there puts you in the siding a region behind it — you do not run into it, and it costs you the extra Stage instead.
Whether a following train may enter an occupied card at all is the Superintendent's ruling (§8.1, Rules §4.5). Getting it wrong is what causes collisions.
Ten drawable cards — Plains twice, the other eight once each — plus the two Division Point cards, which are not drawn.
| Card | Copies |
|---|---|
| Plains | 2 |
| Curves | 1 |
| Hilly | 1 |
| Heavy Grade | 1 |
| Double Track | 1 |
| Uncontrolled Siding | 1 |
| Tunnel | 1 |
| Trestle | 1 |
| Interchange | 1 |
| East / West Division Point | 1 each, not dealt |
The PDF art labels the Interchange "Yard". This reference uses Interchange throughout, to keep it apart from the Division Yard, the Classification Yard, the Yard Office and the Small Yard — five different things.
Region counts and entry points per card are in the table under § The deck.
| Card | Regions | Default entry | Fast / slow entry | Trains may pass | Extra may start |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Plains | 1 | 0 | — | — | — |
| Curves | 2 | 0 | — | — | — |
| Hilly | 2 | 0 | 1 / 0 | — | — |
| Heavy Grade | 3 | 0 | — | — | — |
| Double Track | 1 | 0 | — | yes | — |
| Uncontrolled Siding | 2 | 1 | — | — | — |
| Tunnel | 2 | 0 | — | — | — |
| Trestle | 1 | 0 | — | — | — |
| Interchange | 2 | 1 | — | — | yes |
The Mainline deck is 10 cards; the two Division Points are the fixed ends of the Division and are not dealt. What each card does, in the words the game uses on screen:
The Interchange prints a car-sorting capability. It is not implemented, and never has been. The one thing the card's sortsCars flag actually gates is that an Extra Train may be made up and started here — it is the Mainline card with a yard, which is why §7 allows it. An Extra starting here begins in the back region and takes the extra Stage.
Re-ordering a consist is done at a Small Yard in an Office Area, for one switching Move. See Rules §4.3.
Home Office cards, played onto a Mainline card during a player's Draw option.
| Card | Placement and effect |
|---|---|
| Brakeman | Heavy Grade only. A downhill train starts one region further on. |
| Airbrakes | Heavy Grade only, and Brakeman must already be on that card. A downhill train starts one region further again. |
| Helpers | Heavy Grade only. An uphill train starts one region further on. |
| Realignment | Only onto an unoccupied Mainline card, and only these four conversions: Plains → Double Track, Curves → Plains, Uncontrolled Siding → Double Track, Trestle → Uncontrolled Siding. |
A Heavy Grade is 3 regions, so it is 3 Stages to climb and 3 to run down before help. Modifiers never reduce a crossing below one Stage.
A Realignment can be a card with no legal target. Only four of the nine Mainline types convert at all — Plains, Curves, Uncontrolled Siding and Trestle — so a Division dealt Heavy Grade, Tunnel and Double Track has nowhere to play one. A card already converted cannot be converted again, and a card with a train on it is refused while the train is there. The card says which four it can convert when you look at it in hand.
ABS Signals is dealt from the Home Office deck as an Enhancement, and it is the one Enhancement that is not played into a district. It goes onto a Mainline card — any of them, not only a grade — and takes no square in anybody's Office Area.
What it does: trains on that card will not rear-end each other. A following train is held short of the one ahead instead of running into it, so the Superintendent has no §8.1 judgment to make and no collision is scored. It is the only thing besides a Red Flag that prevents a rear-end collision out on the Mainline, and unlike a Red Flag it stays on the card for the rest of the game.
On the board a card carrying it draws a signal mast with a lit lamp at its top-right corner; the three grade helpers draw as BRK, AIR and HLP beside the card's name. Realignment draws nothing, because a realigned card simply becomes the card it was converted into.
Heavy Grade orientation is rolled from the seed, not chosen by a player. This is a decision, not a gap.
The card prints "(Up)" and "Player sets orientation", which assumes the card has an owner. This one does not: the Division is laid DP · Mainline · Office · Mainline · … · DP, so a Heavy Grade always sits between two districts, or beyond an end Division Point beside one — never inside a single player's district.
Orientation is not cosmetic. Brakeman and Airbrakes help a train running downhill, Helpers helps one running uphill, and odd-numbered trains run west while even run east. Turning the card around decides which modifiers are worth anything and which direction of traffic is favoured, for the whole game. Handing that to one of two neighbours advantages them over the other, and neither has a fair claim to it.
So the orientation is rolled from the game's seed. That is deterministic, roughly even (51/49 east/west), identical in solitaire and multiplayer, and keeps setup non-interactive: the game has no setup phase, so asking would mean interrupting play before the first Local Operations.