Using The ShipIt! Computer Program On An ISL

[FCIN]

Seems that the way you have it set up with all industries on a 24 hour period, it is the limited train length that makes each operating session different, albeit every session will have the train completely full at 5 cars. As you said, with a long enough train length, every spot would be filled every session, because of the 24 hour frequency for each industry.

Gary, adjusting the default times for shipments is something that I really need to experiment with. If you use the default "Demurrage Rules" of 24 hours to load/48 hours to unload and change the frequency of some shipments, that should make a lot of difference.

I did experiment with setting the train length to a value higher than the maximum possible car spots and sure enough, ShipIt pretty much placed and pulled a car for every spot, every session. Adjusting the load/unload times would no doubt have changed that significantly.

For some reason, having the incoming train length change somewhat is important to me.

I think that once car move frequencies are adjusted, that might work itself out. However, ShipIt does give you the option to adjust the train length for your train(s) prior to generating a session, so that could be an option you might want to use from time to time. Where I have my train length set to 5 cars - I could set it to 2 cars and generate a list based on that. The result would be 2 cars inbound and 2 outbound for that session. Only problem with doing that is, say you only wanted to pull a car or two from your industries and not spot anything - no way to adjust that as far as I can see.

Here is one thing about ShipIt that IS really bugging me. The way it prints out the cars on the switch lists. Here's an example of the listing for the inbound train where I was playing around with the longer train length value:     First, looking at the Road and Number fields you can see what I mean about the alphanumeric order. You don't notice it so much just glancing at the list, but if you look closely, you can see the pattern: A, B, C, L, M, P, T, W. Both of my CNA cars with the same commodity/destination and all 3 of my BN box cars (2 with the same commodity/destination) made it on to this train. Not un-prototypical by any means, but as you, I'd like it to be a bit more random.

But here is the main issue. If you look at the Destination field, you can see that the cars are not arranged in blocks by industry, but rather listed in random order. The cars should be blocked in order by industry! You wouldn't leave the yard with your cars in a random fashion like that. If I actually lined up the inbound train per this list, it would be a mess to work the industries!

Of course if you actually had the yard to work before leaving your initial terminal, then you could use this printout to switch your cars and block them in to the proper order. Probably a good situation for a lot of layouts.

However, now look at the page(s) where the work is to be done on the spur, the cars are blocked by industry as they should be:     The bold notations on this example were added by me, but you see that this looks more or less like a prototype switch list, however, I think it would be a bit more prototypical to have the cars to be spotted listed before the cars to be pulled. Better yet, I'd have the work for each industry listed separately. But to get ShipIt to do that, it looks like in my case, I'd have to make each industry its own town!!! ANOTHER idea for an experimental setup!

I wish that ShipIt would list the cars for the inbound train in the same order as they are on this example (starting with ADMX 15818 midway down the page. Were I actually going to stage and operate this session, I'd just ignore the first page and block the train as per the car Set Out field on this page.

You'll also notice that ShipIt is listing industries in alphabetical order and the blocking does not match how I'd have the train blocked. Guess you need to pick names/abbreviations for your industries that would result in proper blocking of the cars or in my case, possibly treat each industry as its own town!

I know that in most cases, it wouldn't matter so much how the cars were blocked on many types of layouts or train situations, just not what I'd want for my layout. If I were running a local freight through 3 towns with only one or two industries to be worked in each town, then ShipIt would work well in that case. For example, if you had one car to spot and one car to pull at Town A, then ShipIt would show each town separately and only the cars to be worked for that town.

Well back to more experimenting. Not getting any modeling or layout work done right now, but this is interesting. It's quite obvious that ShipIt must be set up and fine tuned for each individual layout and operating theme. But there does seem to be ways to get it to work the way you want for the most part. Just have to play with it and think outside of the box.