Hi! We're Mike, Jon, Matt and Tom, and we'll be taking over the Kings Cross signal box for a day on Saturday 30th January! Whilst we'll be doing our best to keep trains moving, expect delays galore, thousands of very fed up passengers and 4 very tired signallers by the time we get to midnight!

Of course - anyone with any sense isn't going to let us near the controls of a real signal box as we'd probably delay everyone indefinitely! So we're using SimSig (a signalling simulation modelled on the real 2000s-era signal box and track layout), running from the start of passenger traffic at around 4am in-game and working through until midnight. 

We'll be putting regular progress updates on Twitter (#SimSigChallenge) and also looking into the possibility of streaming the challenge in its entirety via Twitch, so you can pop in and see just how late your virtual train would be with us at the controls! (we'll confirm exact real-world timings as soon as we've finalised these so you know when to tune in to the chaos! The sim actually will run at around 1.2x speed, so we're probably looking at around a 8am-9am start to aim for a finish as close to midnight real-time as we can)

Back in the real world, the Samaritans do some excellent work with the rail industry and they're always offering anyone a friendly voice at the other end of the phone whenever they might need it, so we thought (particularly as this year we're unable to do a railway challenge, some of us have completed the Tube Challenge for charity in previous years) it'll help us pull through knowing we're doing some good (and hopefully providing some entertainment to anyone watching in a 'what on earth are they doing?!' sense!) whilst trains are queued up here, there and everywhere due to a signal failure affecting the lines into one of the UK's busiest railway terminal several hours into a long day!

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