Currently in the process of making a version of the game that will work (mostly) with cards and a number of cubes to track trains, companies, charts, etc.  There are a fair number of bits to the game and adding paper money/poker chips seems a little much and removes the whole "pocket" feel to it, but PocketCiv also grew out of its own britches as well, so I guess I don't feel that bad.  Playtesting is pretty much done for the solo game.  I need to find a few people for a two-player match.

I will start with a card-based version of the game.  Components appear to be

• The usual 1 cm cubes for the train company markers and track (10 each of red, green, yellow, blue).
• More 1 cm cubes for esources (4 each of brown, yellow, white and black for lumber, fram, trade and coal). 
  
• Capital and train level can be tracked on separate train company cards with some of the company markers mentioned above. 
  
• Money tracked on a VP track.  (A few cards or scorepad for this). 
  
• The 2 player game would need another 10 markers (round 1 cm markers perhaps?) 
  
• 12+ cards for a map and/or 12 chits labeled 1-12 for region numbers.  Cards would have different terrain on them and be ordered any way the player wants.  
• A turn marker and a turn card. 
  
• There's still the matter of coming up with chits for the cities and blight.    I'm thinking a distribution of 6 towns, 5 cities, 4 hubs and 3 metros.  And 10 blights.  
• A revenue card and an event card for each turn. 

By my coun, that's at least 28 cards, 56 cubes, 28(+12?) chits.  That's a lot for a solitaire game.  It was pretty tidy on whiteboard.  Oh well.

All that said, it would look neat to have it spread out.  I think a lot of it would fit pretty easily on a 16 x 20 board, actually.  One of the cool things about Bindle Rails was that people scrapped together all sorts of pieces to make it work and the amount of creativity peopled used to cobble a game together was inspiring.  I'd like to see that for this game.

Anyhow, I'm hoping to wrap it up by the end of Thanksgiving weekend.  We'll see how it goes.