Using The ShipIt! Computer Program On An ISL

[FCIN]

Thank you for taking the time to post your experiences.

More experimenting this evening!

To see if all the effort I went through with ShipIt really made any significant difference, I decided to do a version of my set up in what I'd call the "typical" configuration that most folks would use.

Rather than treat each car spot as a separate industry, I changed it so that each industry was a single entry, but with the car capacity of the industry reflecting the number of car spots. In other words like this:
Industry A - Car Capacity 2, Industry B - Car Capacity 5, etc.

Here are the changes I noted doing this simpler configuration:

Fresh Start (initial setup) - ShipIt did not place a car at every available spot on the spur, but did have at least 1 car placed at each industry. Off to a good start there!

Then I proceeded to generate a minimum of 20 test sessions with these results:

Every switch list that was generated had 5 cars inbound to spot and 5 outbound cars to pull. Since I have my train length maximum set at 5 cars that part is fine, although I would like to have times when the number of inbound/outbound cars don't always balance. There is enough randomness that every industry isn't switched every session.

The inbound commodities were quite random, except that a few industries were receiving certain shipments more frequently than they actually would. In one case, one car and its commodity would come on line about every 4th session, but that was due to the fact that it was the only car in the fleet suitable for that commodity. I should be able to correct this situation by adjusting the shipment frequencies.

After the initial testing, I then proceeded to adjust the shipment frequency times for some commodities to see how that effected things. Adjusting shipment frequencies does make a difference, but will take a lot of experimenting to get things the way I want. I did manage to get that one car to only come on line about every 10th session (twice in 20 test runs).

The one big problem that I have with this simpler configuration, is that often I will get 2 cars inbound for a customer that should only spot at one specific location - so that I don't like.

For example, I have a lumber distributor that is setup to spot a single box car at a storage shed and/or a single bulkhead flat away from the shed. Often I'll get two box cars or two bulkhead flats inbound with this setup. In reality, you'd hold one of the cars and then spot it when the first one is empty. I can't get ShipIt to do that without each spot being treated as a separate industry. This was the main reason that I have the setup where each car spot is treated as an individual industry.

In either of my setups for ShipIt, there are features that work fine and others that won't work as I'd like. But overall, I'd say that ShipIt would work pretty well for most layouts. The program does a great job of keeping track of shipments and where your cars are at all times. It allows for quite a few adjustments if needed, such as permitting you to move a car to a different location if necessary. With all the real life variables that come in to play on the prototype, I'm not sure that any computer program would ever be able to accurately duplicate those variables.

Depending on the size of your layout and the number of cars you have, initial setup can be quite time consuming, but the end result is pretty nice, as you only need to start the program, generate your switch list(s), print them out and off you go! Each session starts from the point you last left off and I really like that.

Now if I could figure out a set up that would work right for tetters!!

ANOTHER LITTLE UPDATE !!!

Just for the fun of it - I setup a version of ShipIt based on the simple switching layout example from Lance Mindheim's new book "How To Build A Switching Layout". If you aren't familiar with this example layout he uses in the book, it's quite simple with only three spurs off the lead - A warehouse, a food processor and a team track, but has the potential for lots of operation.

I modified the design to reflect the way I'd construct it - the warehouse and food processor would each spot 4 cars and the team track (trans-load track) would spot up to 6 cars. Warehouse gets various box cars and commodities, food processor gets reffers, tank cars and box cars - trans-load handles building supplies with bulkhead flats and box cars, covered hoppers of various commodities and tank cars of HFCS.

It was extremely easy to set up this arrangement and it worked just great with ShipIt. Plenty of random car moves, and 5 cars in and out each session. Still have the potential problem of two many of one shipment being delivered (i.e.; two cars of vegetable oil when the food processor only unloads 1), but over all, it works fine. Lot's of variety to the trans-load track and at no time when I tested ShipIt, did it ever fill all the potential car spots - very realistic. Making me consider building a larger version of this layout!