Railroad Tycoon 2 is one of those games where the best way to play is to not win. It isn’t as if you are going to get overrun by barbarians or sacked by your board of directors or, well, die, which are the standard penalties for dawdling about in other, more clear cut gaming genres.

Certainly, if you are playing one of the many scenarios that the Railroad Tycoon franchise offers – which are as diverse as getting Herbert Hoover around every city in the American Midwest during the 1929 General Election to reconstructing the Trans Siberian railway – you can fail to move enough freight or not get your company’s share price high enough and find yourself out of a job, but, considering that this is the worst thing that can possibly happen to you within the confines of the game, it’s pretty benign. So – if you’ve cleared the peasants out of First Class and filled the drinks trolley with crisps and tonic water, let’s fire up ol’ Steaming Jenny for a blast around the Industrial Age.

It’s a very clever game, is Railroad Tycoon. Devised by the same Evangelical Lutherian behind the Civilization franchise – Sid Meier – it deals with the construction and successful running of a rail network, a task which has eluded people who are paid to construct and successfully run actual rail networks in real life. Armed with a swanky new company name and logo, you raise a ton of cash and set about connecting up cities on whatever map is being played. That’s your top level view. You’ll need an awful lot of other viewing levels, however, before you’re clinking glasses of Chablis in an oak panelled boardroom with Isombard Kingdom Brunel. From choosing the engines your railway will be running, to the freight they will be carrying, to which class of train has priority at congested network choke points – you’ll have to be quite the interfering busybody to get everything running smoothly. Technology is evolving all the time (although is not driven by player input) so while you could well start off with a humble Stephenson’s Rocket, clattering along flat out at 12 mph, before long you’ll have bullet trains pinging about the place at over twenty five times that speed.

Of course, it’s all about revenue. This is linked to the speed you can shunt stuff from one place to another. Passengers and mail offer the highest return – and this can be enhanced further by building hotels, restaurants and such at your stations – but is extremely time sensitive. Amusingly, the in game calendar is entirely arbitrary, and it is not unusual to have long journeys taking several weeks to complete. The world of passenger travel is especially cut throat, with rival companies vying for a limited number of punters. Blocking your rivals’ stations up with dawdling freight trains and then running high speed commuter lines from specially built adjacent stations is just one of the ungentlemanly options available here. It’s rare that the AI is so ruthless – at least on easier settings – but it always has a trick or two up its nasty little sleeve with which to nobble your commercial ambitions.

Freight is the safer, lower-yield-but-dependable option, and in many ways offers the more interesting challenge for the digital entrepreneur. You’ll find yourself up a sooty mountainside somewhere carrying tonnes of coal and iron ore on creaky workhorse trains, ensuring the supply to your industrial centres is maintained. The automobile industry, once it kicks in, is a prime example of how involving life as a freight shifter can be: get iron ore and coal to a steel mill. Get the resulting steel to an automobile factory, at the same time as rubber from your plantations. Take the fleets of shiny cars that are produced to population centres where the demand is high, all the time earning spin off cash at every turn, because if you are on the ball you’ll already own the mines, the steel mill, the plantations and the car factory. Lovely jubbly.

There’s all manner of boardroom infighting, too, as you struggle to reward investors with ever-higher share prices and dividends. It can all get very bitchy indeed when outside investment is attracted: get your rivals to invest in your rail network, then deliberately wreck it, bankrupt them, and start over with a few quid you’ve been keeping in the teapot. Brutal.

It’s a lovely game to watch, mind. You can spend ages just watching all your trains moving around your network, adjusting a set of signals here and a maximum shunt limit there. Some scenarios – such as the one where you are required to build a coherent rail network in Stalinist Russia in order to keep the Red Army in action against Hitler – need you be a bit more focused, admittedly. But above all else, this is a great game to just play in an open ended manner, despite all the economic dogfighting, like fiddling about with your very own trainset.

That, then, was Railroad Tycoon. Comforting and risky at the same time, like slipping on a pair of old slippers into which someone may or may not have deposited a jellyfish, for a laugh. Well worth reserving a window seat for.