In Monopoly, the mechanics are centered around dice-rolling, buying and selling property, and making money.
However, that's thanks to a £9bn upgrade of the west coast mainline track paid for by taxpayers, £2bn in franchise subsidies to Virgin Trains paid in the past 15 years, new rolling stock bought as a result of these payments and the share of Network Rail's annual direct subsidy of £3.5bn allocated to the west coast.
As the two couples sat around the board, enthusiastically rolling the dice, buying up properties and moving their tokens around, the Todds were pleased to note that the Darrows liked the game.
Educated at Oxford, Hands began his career at Goldman Sachs before joining Japanese bank Nomura – where he earned his reputation as a dealmaker by buying rolling stock company Angel Trains – and which eventually led to the creation of his private equity firm Terra Firma in 2002.
McCausland raised another $5 million-this tine in a public stock offering-and began rolling them up, buying 300 companies over the next decade.
He thought about buying paper rolling stacks, but enough to roll 7.6 million pennies would cost $6,000.
Liberty is run by tycoon Sanjeev Gupta and has already bought rolling mills in Scotland from Tata.
In 1959, with the money rolling in, Hefner bought a palatial house in Chicago and spent four hundred thousand dollars, a fabulous sum in those days, on its renovation.
Imperial is continuing to diversify, and results in March will be boosted by earnings from the Douwe Egberts Van Nelle rolling tobacco unit, bought last July.
TSB recently revealed it is rolling out its buy-to-let mortgage range through London & Country ahead of a planned a wider launch.
