Using The ShipIt! Computer Program On An ISL

[FCIN]

Been thinking on this: Seems it is important to get the numbers balanced to allow ShipIt to act in a random fashion.

Gary;

Not sure about having to get the numbers balanced, except as noted below. I just completed a test to answer a question or two for myself. Using my current ISL plan which has 5 industries:

Ind A - 2 car spots
Ind B - 5 car spots
Ind C - 2 car spots
Ind D - 6 car spots
Ind E - 2 car spots

This test was run using my first setup for ShipIt where each car spot is treated as a separate industry, so ShipIt thinks I actually have 17 industries. I may try it again later using the "typical" version where there are only 5 industries with the appropriate number of car spots.

I currently have 79 cars in the database (will add the rest as they get their metal wheel sets or get repainted as required for a few of them).

My train length is limited to 5 cars because of staging - so I wanted to see first and foremost if every car would come on the layout as it had seemed in the past that some never came on line.

After the Fresh Start initialization I kept generating sessions and counting the number of times that each car came on line. By session 31, EVERY car in the database had come on line at least once. Of course some cars came on line more than once and that is due to the number of appropriate cars I have for some commodities.

16 cars came on line two times in 31 sessions
15 cars came on line three times in 31 sessions
6 cars came on line four times in 31 sessions
1 car came on line five times in 31 sessions
1 car came on line six times in 31 sessions (only available car for that commodity)
All the rest made only one appearance in 31 sessions. Pretty random I'd say.

But ALL cars in the database did come on line, so obviously something wasn't right when I tried to use it in the past and that was something I really wanted to test. Glad to find out that I was wrong!

What I did notice is that since ShipIt keeps your car database in MARKS-NUMBER order, it pulls available cars of the same type in that order. For example I have 4 CNW covered hoppers of the same type, so they appeared on line, one at a time, in numerical order. In every situation where I have two or more cars of the same type, they would always appear in numerical order. Cars of the same type, but with different marks, will come on line by mark, then number order, so GATX 4470 will come on line before LSIX 144.

It appears that ShipIt attempts to fill car orders for each industry every time you create a session, but of course my limited train length won't allow it to do so, and therefore car orders pile up, but they do get delivered. I'd guess that if my train length matched the available number of car spots, then ShipIt would attempt to furnish cars for each industry every time assuming there were orders to be filled for each industry.

I made no adjustments to the car order frequency in this test either, using the default value of 24 hours for everything. I would also say that if I had it setup to run two or three trains in a 24 hour period (1st, 2nd, 3rd shift yard jobs), that it would have made a big difference in filling the car orders.

I didn't attempt to keep track of how many times a car was spotted at a particular spot - too time consuming, but in general, it appeared that at the two industries with more than 2 car spots, something got placed at each spot at least once.

One thing I have noticed for this type of setup, is that I have at least two customers that should be receiving one or two cars every day, and that doesn't happen. There are options in ShipIt to give individual shipments higher priority than others and of course to adjust the frequency of shipments too, but I haven't really ventured much into doing that.

What I'll probably have to do is setup ShipIt with the configuration where there are only 5 industries with the appropriate number of car spots for each, set shipment priorities and frequencies and just forget about the switch list indicating to spot cars at specific locations. Not the way I'd like, but workable. Just would have to figure out a way to keep excess cars from coming on line for car spots that can only handle one of that type of car at a time. I may still have to setup some specific car spots as separate industries, to prevent that from happening. More testing!

One thing that has really made ShipIt work better for me, was creating and using simplified UMLER type codes for the cars rather than the AAR designations. It does require you to make a lot more shipper/consignee/commodity pairings, but it's worth the extra effort for realistic operation.

---- tetters ----

As you can see from reading my recent posts, ShipIt does require a lot of fine-tuning and experimenting with various ways to set it up. At this stage of the game, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to use it for my layout, once it's officially in operation. I have been playing around some with it, by generating sessions with a limited number of cars on the temporary track setup and am fairly pleased with the results. I really like the convenience of using this program rather than trying to keep track of everything myself - even though I don't mind wearing the Freight Agent's hat in addition to being conductor/brakeman/engineer. :-)