Time line

I've been a bit quiet lately. This is partly because I did some more work on my 1825 web site, played another test of Ian D Wilson's 1812 prototype, and have had a few other things on the go as well. I have still found some time for Britain Under Steam. Some of this has been spent on research; I'm reading Christian Wolmar's book Fire and Steam, and I've found a copy of Snell's Britain's Railways Under Steam to read after that. It's also worth mentioning that Wikipedia has a large amount of information about the history of early British railway companies.

I've been putting together a timeline that shows key events such as the formations of important companies, completion of certain railway lines, company mergers and so forth. I was helped immensely by Lou Jerkich's Historical Order variant for 1825, in which he collected much of this information already. To start my timeline, I took the background information from Lou's variant, put all the events into historical order, and then added other bits and pieces as I found them.

This is making a number of small effects on the game design. I've rethought the way I plan to start companies and I will come back to this soon, casting my eyes over the timeline as a whole.
Every so often I note something that leads to a tweak on the board; no major redesigns, just a tidying up or an improvement in one area or another. I've had another thought about how to represent difficult terrain, too. So all in all, this background reading has been worthwhile.