Q is for Quick trade card. The collectible shown below was disgorged by a coin-operated railway station weighing machine some time in the 1950s. Small compared to most cigarette and tea cards, the 24 cards in the British Automatic Company’s ‘Famous Trains of the World’ set measure 28mm x 53mm and came defaced with a somewhat optimistic entreaty.

No. 5 depicts The Pines Express, a train that ran between Manchester and Bournemouth from 1910 to 1967. Today services between the two cities go via Oxford, Reading, Basingstoke, and Southampton. In the days of the Pine Express they took a more direct, demanding, and picturesque route.

R is for Revised classics

The version of Combat Mission: Beyond Overlord that reached Steam yesterday is not the same as the one GOG has been selling since 2009. The newcomer’s higher v number (v1.14) reflects the fact that SNEG have tinkered before re-releasing. If you’ve already bought CMBO a couple of times, the following list of changes may not persuade you to purchase it a third time.

• Stability fixes (closing with ALT+F4, smoother replays, cleaner animations).
• Visual adjustments (fire textures improved, fire now slightly transparent).
• Better usability (support for non-4:3 resolutions, camera zoom with mouse wheel, ESC to pause).
• A simple new options menu (F2) to tweak display settings and camera behavior.

However, the prospect of mouse wheel zooming may well prompt the GM of THC’s latest play-by-comment CM experiment to switch versions mid-Bogen.

Re-released alongside CMBO, the other two CMx1 titles, Barbarossa to Berlin and Afrika Korps, have also undergone light modernisation.

S is for skate.

…a new Early Access conveyance sim co-funded by Elastoplast and Savlon

T is for Truck Parking World

I’m hoping the absence of in-cab images on TPW’s Steam page is an oversight, not an indication that this six quid, 90 challenge offering doesn’t offer first-person views.

U is for Unusual ‘rail sim’

It’s a tough life being a Railway Chai Wala in India. If you’re not preparing masala chai, vada pav, samosa, or ‘Fuggi’ noodles, for platform users, you’re dealing with the aftermath of a series of ****** *******. Like the snacks available in Fakripur’s station buffet, Saumya Parmar and Shubhankar Haldia’s free creation is flavoursome but won’t sustain you for long.