Well, we haven't had enough good meaty games around here lately...so I'm going to propose one.
I don't have the time to sign up for this, but as a fairly frequent 18xx player (mostly face-to-face, but some online as well) I cannot resist commenting the idea.
I've been really interested in trying out an 18xx game for a good while now. I've seen 18AL suggested as a good intro to the series.
There are two alternative theories on which variants are good for the first game. 18AL is indeed amongst the top suggestions for the theory "it is a good idea to start with a simpler, more forgiving, variant".
I'm personally in favor of the other theory, which suggest directly jumping to the deep end of the pool. One naturally should not start with the most complex alternatives (say, 18C2C that last roughly 15 hours in face-to-face game), but the basic idea is to start with a less forgiving variant with more companies. A good example would be 1856, but also the classic 1830 is okay. The reason for such suggestion is that a game of 18AL might easily progress from start to finish without any of the events people generally consider the most interesting ones in 18xx games. If nobody dumps companies, the train rush is too slow, nobody ends up needing to buy a diesel with their own money, and nobody goes even near bankruptcy, then there is a high risk that the game will simply feel boring. 18AL has only 6 companies, which means that (at least) two of the players in a four-player game will not have more than one company and will hence have no chance to appreciate many of the basic maneuvers of 18xx; no shuffling of trains between the companies, no agony of trying to figure out when and where to put up the 2nd company, no concept of using one company to primarily help the other etc.
In the end a game with a harsher variant where 1-2 of the players mess up severely while someone pulls up a nice stunt that seals the game already midway is usually more interesting than a game of 18AL where everyone has the same primary company throughout the game and the game reduces to mostly a track-laying puzzle. My personal belief is that this holds already from the very first game -- I know quite a few of 18xx fans that have been utterly trashed in their first games. I personally started with 1856.
That said, I do understand also the value of starting with a straightforward variant, especially if playing online, so the above rant should maybe be considered as a general advice, not really a suggestion to not play 18AL.
I've made a google-doc for the board, company boards, bank, etc here:
You did this by yourself? Very impressive. However, I still have a feeling that playing the game via that google-doc is going to be very difficult for someone who has not played the game before.
The free software
rails works very well and especially combined with Dropbox for storing the save-game files it is quick and easy to play. The software forces most rules (it is not strict enough with track-building so some care has to be taken), which should help especially when playing for the first time. I get the idea of playing via the forum, but perhaps you could combine Rails with some forum-activity? For example, you could still use the forum to announce the actions but keep track of the data in Rails with a link to the latest game-state in the thread? Then everyone could download the file, try out different options for laying down the track etc. Rails also calculates the optimal income, which might be a bit tricky to do near the end of the game.