My son loves trains. Once in a while, we’re playing with electric toy trains. Sometimes this means just having them move around and use switches to change their routes, and sometimes it means building two or more stations and moving actual (toy) people and (toy) wares between stations.
Recently, we came up with an idea to level up our game. Why not create an actual (toy) timetable and start and stop trains at the right moment? Very soon, a serious limitation revealed itself. When the (real) time needed to move from station A to station B is less than a minute, the timetable starts to look a bit funny: departure at 13:37 and arrival at 13:38 is pretty weird. Also, a real train timetable “repeats itself” with a 24-hour period, but we need a much shorter period for playing. (We solved it by only having times modulo 10 minutes, but that meant that we only could have about 3–4 routes in one 10-minute period.)
The solution to this seems obvious: we need a “toy clock” to show “toy time”, with two important features: the “toy time” should be much faster than real time, and we should be able to set the “toy time” to any time we want.
Me being me, I decided to write a simple application for that. I guess most people would use JavaScript and make it a very simple, front-end only web app. Me being me, I decided to code it in Emacs Lisp.
The actual implementation is quite simple, with about 75 lines of code. An important part is handling the window displaying the time; I made an effort to center the clock both horizontally and vertically in the buffer. That was a bit tricky because I wanted to display both the real time (with a normal face) at the top, and the “toy time” at the center with a much bigger face. That meant using window-body-height with the pixelwise parameter set to t, and taking font heights into consideration. Also, I learned about the window-max-chars-per-line function, which allows to find out how many characters can be displayed in a line in a given window with a given face. The code works pretty well, with some minor limitations – for example, if more than one window shows the buffer with the clock, one of them may look bad.
Another problem I had to solve was how to make the clock update automatically. Of course, that meant using timers, but it took me a few iterations to decide, for example, how to start the clock or how to handle the situation when the user deletes the window with the clock. For now, I decided to use switch-to-buffer and delete-other-windows, which is not very elegant, but makes sense UI-wise, and to cancel the timer if the user kills the clock buffer or even deletes its window.
Anyway, here is the code. I have some ideas for some new cool features, but this works well enough to have some fun already!
;;; toy-train-timetable.el --- Toy train timetable -*- lexical-binding: t; -*-
;; Copyright (C) 2026 Marcin Borkowski
;; Author: Marcin Borkowski <mbork@mbork.pl>
;; Keywords: games
;; This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
;; it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
;; the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
;; (at your option) any later version.
;; This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
;; but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
;; MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
;; GNU General Public License for more details.
;; You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
;; along with this program. If not, see <https://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.
;;; Commentary:
;; This is a simple clock showing accelerated time for the purpose of
;; playing with toy trains and creating a timetable for them. By
;; default, the "toy time" is four times faster than real time.
;;; Code:
(defvar ttt-start-real-time nil
"Real time when the clock starts.")
(defvar ttt-start-toy-time nil
"Toy time when the clock starts.")
(defface ttt-face '((t :height 8.0))
"The height of the clock face.")
(defcustom ttt-toy-time-speed 4
"Speed of the play time.
The default of 4 means 4 play seconds pass in 1 real second.")
(defcustom ttt-update-interval 15
"The interval (in seconds play time) between clock updates.")
(defun ttt-compute-time (time)
"Compute the play time given real time TIME."
(time-add
ttt-start-toy-time
(seconds-to-time
(* (time-to-seconds (time-subtract time ttt-start-real-time))
ttt-toy-time-speed))))
(defvar ttt-refresh-timer nil
"Timer used to refresh the timetable buffer.")
(defvar ttt-buffer-name " *Toy Train Timetable*"
"Name of the timetable buffer.")
(defun ttt-refresh ()
"Refresh the timetable buffer."
(if-let* ((ttt-buffer (get-buffer ttt-buffer-name))
(ttt-window (get-buffer-window ttt-buffer t)))
(with-current-buffer ttt-buffer
(with-selected-window ttt-window
(let* ((inhibit-read-only t)
(height (window-body-height nil t))
(default-font-height (default-font-height))
(ttt-font-height (window-font-height nil 'ttt-face))
(vertical-padding
(/ (- height ttt-font-height default-font-height)
default-font-height
2))
(width (window-max-chars-per-line nil 'ttt-face))
(horizontal-padding (/ (- width 8) 2)))
(erase-buffer)
(insert (format-time-string " %T")
(make-string (max 0 vertical-padding) ?\n)
(propertize
(concat
(make-string (max 0 horizontal-padding) ?\s)
(format-time-string
"%T" (ttt-compute-time (current-time))))
'face 'ttt-face)
"\n")))
(goto-char (point-min)))
(when (timerp ttt-refresh-timer)
(cancel-timer ttt-refresh-timer))))
(defun toy-train-timetable (real-start-time play-start-time)
"Create a toy train timetable buffer and start the mode."
(interactive (list
(org-read-date t t nil "Real start time? ")
(org-read-date t t nil "Play start time? ")))
(setq ttt-start-real-time real-start-time)
(setq ttt-start-toy-time play-start-time)
(switch-to-buffer (get-buffer-create ttt-buffer-name))
(delete-other-windows)
(special-mode)
(when (timerp ttt-refresh-timer)
(cancel-timer ttt-refresh-timer))
(setq ttt-refresh-timer
(run-with-timer
t
(/ ttt-update-interval ttt-toy-time-speed 1.0)
#'ttt-refresh)))
(provide 'toy-train-timetable)
;;; toy-train-timetable.el ends here