Picture the scene. There's a man at a train station, wearing a blue anorak and clutching a thermos flask in one hand, a laptop in the other. Can you possibly get a geekier combination than trains and computers? No, is the simple answer, not in the dimension we inhabit, at any rate.

So, Railroads (we'll lose the exclamation mark for now): a game for blokes with dandruff, questionably-stained trousers and vinyl recordings of the Class 50 diesel engine leaving York station on a windy Wednesday morning?

No it isn't, actually. Even though part of the Railroads experience is playing around with a giant train set, it's an engaging logistical strategy game as well. But that said, on the basic vast train set level it still manages to be thoroughly entertaining.

There's nothing like laying a treble width section of track on a busy route of multiple freight engines and watching them negotiate their way slickly through your well designed crossovers. Or carving a tunnel out through a massive mountainside and sending your high speed passenger express on its new super-quick route. The environments and trains are visually detailed and polished, and the whole thing looks like the sort of miniature model railway you wished for as a kid.

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Of course, these train tracks are supposed to make money and not merely look pretty. There are towns and resources dotted across every map (with seven playable scenarios in total) and these have to be linked in the most profitable way possible.

For example, a cattle ranch can be joined up to a town with a food processing factory, which in turn is linked to a city that has a high demand for food. Freight trains make plenty of dosh when they're shipping advanced goods - such as brand new cars - though your passenger trains will be a staple money-spinner between the big cities.

It's easy to get the hang of all this and the interface really helps, as icons pop up clearly illustrating supply and demand when you select a city or resource. As the game goes on, you open up more routes and upgrade your train engines, but there are also industries and stocks to dabble in.

Again, the mechanics for these are quite simple. Taking the paragraph before last's example, the player can purchase the town's food processing industry and make a small profit on every unit of cattle processed (even your opponent's). The stocks and shares system determines the buyout price on a company, and holding your own shares is a protective measure, whereas owning your opponent's gives you a cheaper buyout price. Buying your opponent out finishes them, and grants you control of their entire network.

So the game economy is pretty basic by design, but at the same time it's easy to get to grips with and not without more complex underlying decisions. Early on in the game, do you quickly expand your track to the most lucrative industries, or use your money to play the stock market before anyone else and buy opposition shares while they're low?

Buying up industries early on is generally a sound idea, as they'll make profit throughout the whole game, but how much dough can you spare away from track development? And all the while, you've got to keep a close eye on what your opponents are doing.

Even so, more hard-core tycoon fans may well feel that the management and economic models have been dumbed down too much from Railroad Tycoon 3, which went into far more depth and nitty-gritty details. However, we found that Railroads struck an apt balance between being very accessible and yet containing enough management depth to keep things interesting. There's still a definite skill to playing it, particularly if you take matters online and hook up with some human opponents.

For us, there was only one area in which the game's tracks were covered with the wrong sort of leaves, and that was its technical issues. Various bugs kept cropping up, from a re-occurring crash-to-desktop error which knackered one of our saved games, through to trains getting stuck or making really daft decisions about which tracks to travel along.

There are also minor niggles with the interface - some icons don't register when you click on them sometimes - and graphical glitches, like the farmyard animals at the cattle ranch suddenly appearing a hundred feet in the air (and they say pigs don't fly).

Are these game-ruining problems? No, they're not, but they can test your patience at times, and the sooner a patch is released which helps smooth these over, the better, because in all other respects Railroads is a highly enjoyable slice of track management.

Veteran tycoons might find Railroads too simplistic for their tastes, but we really appreciated the new streamlined management aspects and heightened accessibility. There's a very playable simulation here, but it's a little muddied by a number of bugs.