Each player has a great number of little plastic trains and in the beginning are given 3 route cards.  These route cards show different routs or city connections that the players have to connect to get points.  One example might be Sante Fe to Salt Lake City, or even a whopping Los Angeles to New York City.  Each player has to keep at least 2 of the 3 routs, but does have the option to keep all 3 if they choose.  After deciding on your routes you can put your 2-3 route cards down and your then delt 4 train cards.  The train cards are all colored and match the color of the different city routes on the board (i.e. LA to Las Vegas is one color and Vegas to Salt Lake City is another), so if your route is LA to Salt Lake City, you have to complete each city route to complete your full route if that makes sense, and they’ll each be different colors.  So you’ll continue to gather train cards by colors two at a time per turn until you have all the colors needed to complete your city route.  You’ll continue like this until you have completed your routes, then for one of your turns you have the option to get more route cards, but this time you only have to keep at least 1 of the 3.  But be careful cause if you don’t complete you route by the end of the game those points go against you.  Each player continues until there a player has 2 or less trains left.  When that happens everyone has one more turn and the game is over.  You keep score as the game goes along on the score keeper that outlines the board.  It is at the end of the game that you calculate all route points then add those to the points you got as you laid down city routes, then there’s one more bonus for the person who has the longest train.  After all those points are added up we then see our winner and the game is over.