03-03-2012, 12:34 PM
Well, I can't complain. Within about an hour and a half, I was able to enter a locomotive, a car, two locations with yard tracks and spurs, a route, and a train, and I was able to run the train. The switchlist instructed the operator to pick up a locomotive in the diesel shop track, go to the yard track, pick up a boxcar, run to the other station, drop the boxcar at an industry track, and return to the first location and put the loco back in the diesel shop track.
One concern continues to be that for something I'd just use as a switchlist generator, it's a hog -- takes a long time to start on my middle-aged Windows XP system, and it's just much more program than I need. On the other hand, it isn't a fiddle-with-it-because-you-just-like-to-fiddle sort of deal, the way some other switchlist generators are. It works, and it ain't that hard to get running.
Not bad at all for a free program. There are some features that I don't think are as user-friendly as they might be, and for good use, I would need to do things like edit the AAR car types to make them into actual AAR car types (!!), but just looking at it, there are some good features that are neither in Minirail nor RailOp. For instance, RailOp makes it optional to assign a locomotive to a train, while the JMRI switchllist requires it, and it requires the loco to be in a positive location (i.e, a yard track or engine terminal/shop track). This is neater, I think.
I will try this some more, thanks very much for the tip.
One concern continues to be that for something I'd just use as a switchlist generator, it's a hog -- takes a long time to start on my middle-aged Windows XP system, and it's just much more program than I need. On the other hand, it isn't a fiddle-with-it-because-you-just-like-to-fiddle sort of deal, the way some other switchlist generators are. It works, and it ain't that hard to get running.
Not bad at all for a free program. There are some features that I don't think are as user-friendly as they might be, and for good use, I would need to do things like edit the AAR car types to make them into actual AAR car types (!!), but just looking at it, there are some good features that are neither in Minirail nor RailOp. For instance, RailOp makes it optional to assign a locomotive to a train, while the JMRI switchllist requires it, and it requires the loco to be in a positive location (i.e, a yard track or engine terminal/shop track). This is neater, I think.
I will try this some more, thanks very much for the tip.