Nice little switchlist generator

[steinjr]

By Dave Husman, a modification of an idea by Mike Rose:

http://model-railroad-hobbyist.com/node/...ment-55834

How it is used:
You once fill in your industries and spots on the first sheet - and then copy the relevant lines to the other sheets - based on job (and perhaps location/town if you want to use that as well).

Job, Industry, Spot and Car type is probably self explanatory.
Frequency is how many days (out of 7 sessions/days) on average a delivery request will be generated for that spot.
Excessive delivery probability is the percentage chance of a car being delivered even if the spot will not be available (i.e off spot cars)
Leave occupied probably affects whether a pull request will be generated for an occupied spot

When you want to generate a new switchlist you just go through the column "occupied" and removes the x if the spot is not occupied, or adds an x if the spot is occupied. The columns "pick up" and "deliver" are generated, based on frequency, excessive delivery probability and leave occupied probability.

The rest of the sheets are just selections of data from the first sheet, in a format more suited to be printed for each job.

Simple, yet nice. Adds an element of randomness to the traffic.

Smile,
Stein

[steinjr]

I tried this idea on my layout, to see how it worked.

First page for my little switching shelf layout:


Only modification I did was that for a couple of spots that could handle several car types, instead of just adding a specific car type in column D, I added a formula like this example:



The formula basically says that it is a 75% chance of (Box or Tank), a 25% change of (Flat or Gondola)
Then I split each of those in half again. So in the end there is a:
37.5% chance of Box
37.5% chance of Tank
12.5% chance of Flat and
12.5% chance of Gondola

One could of course mix and match percentages and car types to whatever seems appropriate for one's own layout

I then made a page 2, 3 and 4 with the three jobs I defined:

The Freight House job:


The Barge Terminal job (which also switch Anderson Chemical and the Team track):


The Dairy and Gern job


Basically, these sheets just get values from different rows on page 1.

And then I took one of the jobs for a spin. I printed out the switchlist for the freight house job, picked out suitable cars for the spots to be made, and noted car reporting marks and numbers in the notes column by pen. Then I let my train "arrive" with inbound cars, organized the inbound cars, pulled outbound cars and spotted inbound cars.

Worked like a charm.

To generate a new switchlist, I just adjust column H (Occupied) on the first sheet. If I don't like what I get, I just hit F9 to have excel recalculate formulas (and thus pull new random numbers).

Of course - it is in principle not very different from me just deciding for myself what to pull and what to spot, but it is somehow a little more fun to have it determined by "outside forces" :-)

Smile,
Stein

[jwb]

This still seems like a lot of work. There are commercial switchlist generators that are more refined and have all the features of this one, but seem to take a lot less work to generate a switchlist. For instance, Minirail at <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://minirail.com/">http://minirail.com/</a><!-- m --> has a free demo that you can download and use with a small number of cars and spots -- enough for a micro, certainly. Minirail is for Windows. There's also a free mac switchlist generator at <!-- m --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.vasonabranch.com/railroad/switchlist.html">http://www.vasonabranch.com/railroad/switchlist.html</a><!-- m -->

[steinjr]

This still seems like a lot of work.

I just downloaded a ready made spreadsheet and played with entering various values in the fields.

I have also played with several other switchlist generators before. The work lies in entering your industries, your cars etc. And that is pretty much the same no matter what program you use. I downloaded minirail for a quick test drive - it also seems based on the idea that you have to enter your rolling stock in addition to your industries before you can generate switch lists.

The simple little excel spreadsheet I downloaded bypasses the entering of rolling stock and keeping track of which car is spotted where.

It just tells you what spots to pull, and what type of car to spot in various spots. You then can add in pencil (if you so choose) on the printout which specific cars to spot and pull. The only thing you need to enter to generate a list is to show which spots are currently occupied (by putting an x in the column occupied).

Not trying to keep track of car reporting marks and numbers within the generator program save you from the most annoying feature of most switch list generator programs - what happens when the recorded state in the program gets out of synch with the actual state on the layout.

But I guess I should call it a traffic generator rather than a switchlist generator. It doesn't really produce a full switch list - it produces a set of tasks for you - pull the car in this spot, leave the car in that spot, spot a boxcar here, spot a tank car there.

Anyways - I though it was a neat little idea that can be implemented with a minimum of fuss. Not much of an investment to just list your spots (as opposed to entering dozens or hundreds of cars, and then have to struggle with synchronizing the state of the program and the state of the layout) :-)

Smile,
Stein

[shortliner]

Stein - you have a PM