Thanks for the input Randy. I'll have to look up that program and download it, just to have in on my hard disk in case I lose all my hair and my grey matter starts leaking out my ears because of Ship It.

FYI - The Club uses it and they like it. Soooo I picked it up on that recommendation. Probably should have asked around here first as well. :?

Only place I think you can get it is the CarCards group on Yahoo. And that place is full of people who do operations using cards - so you cna probably get any questions answered even if you don't use Dave' program.

--Randy

Tetters, I ask because I developed a program with Access to do pretty much the same thing, and it's almost up to being operable. But I'm having trouble with the car capacity for the set-out tracks. It gets to be a bit messy having to keep track of what's where, if it's gonna get moved or not, and how many can then be set out...And the ol' grey matter isn't what it was a few years ago when I started to mess with the program....

tetters Wrote:(...) in case I lose all my hair and my grey matter starts leaking out my ears because of Ship It.

Don't let that happen! It may work out okay for your layout operations. If it gets to the point that you are going bald - try using Car Cards. I plan on giving that a try myself, but actually I plan on just making up a simple demurrage sheet to keep track of what cars are placed for what shipper and when and then use the simple 24 hours to load and 48 hours to unload formula and use that information to make up switch lists. One neat thing about a model railroad is that not only do you get to be conductor and/or engineer, you also can assume the role of railroad agent and shipper too.

The first thing I realized when I got ShipIt, was I was going to have a problem with wrong car types being sent to industries if I only used the AAR Mech Desig. Example: All Covered Hoppers are AAR type "LO", but that doesn't begin to tell the program what type of covered hopper it is. If I used only the AAR code "LO" then I'd have cars suitable only for plastic pellets being used for grain and vice-versus. Same thing can happen with box cars. If it's an "XM" is it 40ft or 50ft? If a customer only loads 50ft cars, they sure don't want a 40ft spotted! Box cars can be broken down into "XM", "XL", "XF", "XP", etc. but that still doesn't solve all potential issues.

First thing I did was use a simplified UMLER type code for each car type rather than the AAR Desg. That seems to have corrected that problem, but also created a lot more set up work in ShipIt - especially if the same type of car can be used for more than one commodity.

Of course if you only have a few car types, say all the same type covered hoppers, then using the AAR Mech Desig should work okay in ShipIt. But when you add all the different type cars there are and the fact that some can only be used for specific commodities, then it gets complicated and you'll start pulling out your hair! The Athearn ore car you were inquiring about is another good example. A type "GT" can also be a gon that you'd load scrap in so if you have both types of cars, you sure wouldn't want an ore loading only car spotted for scrap loading.

On my simple temporary switching layout that I was experimenting using ShipIt on, I would create several sessions worth of switchlists at one time and got to noticing that some cars would repeatedly come on line, while others seemed to never move, even though I had matching car type, commodity, shippers and consignees. Not sure what was causing that, but it was very frustrating.

Just my experiences - don't give up on it yet! Like the ShipIt manual suggests - start simple and if it's working okay, then add to it.

You may have to tweak the program or the data base repeatedly to get it to work. Last time I used one we had a nightly event of trading the boxcars on adjacent sidings. And we never did manage to get a unit train down from the coal mine.
The first operating program we used was a Basic program from the NMRA Bulletin. I had to try debugging things even though my language was Fortran.
It may ignore some cars because it goes through the car list until it finds the first empty of the right type, so some of them never get moved.
Try not to get too many cement hoppers at the flour mill.

Ah FORTRAN, now that brings back some memories. I should do some sort of useful program in FORTRAN and make it public domain or at least open source and see how many people it would drive nuts.

--Randy

I had to leave the ForTran behind when I retired and found out the price of a compiler.

Free? http://www.g95.org/index.shtml

I haven't tried this, suffice to say the dialect has changed a bit since I learned it in the 80's, using the FORTRAN '77 standard. I've probably forgotten more than I remember, I was only good at it because after having it in High School it was again a requirement for all engineering majors and sicne that was round 2 for me, I did so well I was asked to be a (paid) tutor for my final 3 years. And I actually USED it at my first job - we had a Brown & Sharpe coordinate measuring machine controlled with a PDP-11 computer and one of the available compilers on it was FORTRAN so I wrote all my parts measuring programs in FORTRAN.

Ah the days when it was fairly easy and FUN to progrma computers, now there is so much enforced structure and it takes a whole routine to do what a line or two used to do, and it's no longer fun.

Sorry, off topic - just reminiscing.

--Randy