Using The ShipIt! Computer Program On An ISL

[FCIN]

I may have mislead you by my use of "interchange". Basically, my interchange is just staging. I won't actually have the Class 1 roads dropping off cars there. It will just be done by hand similar to what you do for your staging. Just that my layout has staging on both ends. So as an example, a load form an industry on my layout will be taken to the interchange and left there, then after the operating session is over, I will take that car off the layout by hand and place it in storage drawers.

Initially, I thought that the setup you describe would be the easy way to do it, but I'm wondering if the number of cars that are interchanged from each of these offline staging/interchange points might be determined by your train length. That's the way it works on my setup. You may actually have to set up divisions/interchanges in order to get it to work as you want. You'll just have to see.

I've got some other scenarios to think about, will detail them later, but it basically involves my home road cars being stored at my "home road" yard and then being used for shipments, then returning to the home road yard. The home yard is in the middle of the layout between the two interchange staging yards at the ends.

Home Road Yard --------> Industry ++++++> interchange ++++++> off layout --------> interchange --------> home road yard

So the car starts off on the layout, goes to industry, goes to staging, then goes off layout, then comes back as an empty and sent to the home road yard for storage on the layout.

That should work just fine. As you input your cars in to the database, you'd set the Home Yard for your cars to be "Home Road Yard". I'm pretty sure that when car orders need to be filled, ShipIt will first check what is available on the home road before it looked at the offline cars. Shipper would be your industry and the Consignee would be one of your offline staging points. When the car has been offline for the length of time you set, then it would be returned to Home Road Yard. I think there may be another option in ShipIt to insure that happens.

Since we've both got different operating schemes, it's a bit difficult for me to say that different set ups will or won't work. Just will take some playing around for you to see if it does work okay for you. You can sure spend a lot of hours messing with the ShipIt program, but for me at least, it seems to be worth it, at least so far.

As I mentioned in the post to David, I added 6 new cars and a new car code to the database last night. I changed the name of one of the industries and added another car spot to that industry to receive these cars and then another product/car type for those cars. ShipIt updated everything automatically including the train schedule to reflect these changes. All I had to do at that point, was to add one shipper of that product/car type and one consignee for it, adjust the load/unload time and frequency and it worked just fine.

After the initial setup, it appears to be quite easy to add more cars, commodities, shippers and consignees without having to start from scratch. Thank goodness!