Using The ShipIt! Computer Program On An ISL

[FCIN]

Ed: There are a couple of possibilities why the program is picking off cars in Alphabetical order.
1) You entered them that way. Not totally unlikely, but normally there would be a few variances.
2) the program maintains an list sorted by road name and number within car type.
Is it showing there the first 3 cars of that type or are there others in between?
It may happen that after you run the program a while the cars get shifted around a bit.
Can you specify a stay in the yard before they get sent out again? Say, after a car has gone to Smith and return it has a 10 day period (where it gets sent out west to be reloaded)?
I remember trying to tweak programs to get certain cars moving or not moving every week.

David;
I'm thinking that this is the way that ShipIt is programmed. As it seems that no matter how you initially input the car data, it is always sorted out in alpha/numeric order. Last night I added 6 more cars to the database, all the same car type and with the same destination, but with assorted roads and numbers and as these cars appeared on line, ShipIt still brought them on line in alpha/numeric order. Really not so much of an issue with me, since certain car types are only suitable for certain commodities and destinations; it's pretty much as I expected.

Adjusting the load/unload times for certain shipments and the frequency of these shipments (keeping cars "offline" longer) really helps with making the program function in a more prototypical manner.

I'm thinking that after you've generated several operating sessions that things "settle down" quite a bit. Generating a lot of test sessions after I setup different configurations seems to demonstrate that.

My setup of ShipIt is certainly different than what most people would have, but I have been quite pleased with the fact that if I can "imagine" a certain setup, such as treating each industry as separate town, will work. Just going to have to continue to tweak it some more.