For each town on your layout, you will need to add the industries that are located there. There is no limit to the number of industries in a town, just your basement size! Each industry can have as many railway sidings as needed. This program has sidings in industries, though the opposite is another approach. That is, there are sidings with industries on them. Either way works and does not work depending upon if industries share a single siding, or an industry has more than one dedicated siding. Because this program does shipments on an industry by industry basis, I decided to view sidings as an item of an industry, not an industry is an item of a siding. Thus, if a single piece of track has more than one industry on it, that part of the track that services the industry is the industry's siding. Thus three industries on one piece of track, even sharing the same spot, will have it's own "siding", a location on that bit of track.
Each siding can have its capacity or size in either the number of cars or in scale feet, which ever is appropriate for the siding. Take care to understand that if you create too many shipments in and out of your industries, you run the risk of overflowing sidings at those industries. The program can handle this, but it does not prevent cars from being sent to full sidings (you have the ability to indicate where you put a car that cannot be spotted due to full sidings) as that would prevent a shipment that is supposed to take place. Making shipments too excessive will cause more work interacting with the computer, as well as adding to the frustration of train crews. In reality, new sidings would be built, but you may not have the space on your layout to expand an industry.
You can also indicate for each industry if it is switched by trains that only go up the route, or only down the route, or by all trains. If a train is going up a route, and a car is destined for an industry that gets switched only down the route, then the car will be sent to the yard at the end of the route. There would have to be a yard there as a train running down the route has to originate from there. If the train is an up then back again, this feature is ignored, you simply switch the industry on your way back.
For each industry select if it is an actual industry, or an interchange to another railroad. This is important for off layout shipments especially if you use shipments to other’s layouts. Thus interchanges are considered as "industries". This program does not care about the ultimate destination that is not on the layout. Thus Canada Spool and Bobbin in Walkerton ships to somewhere in British Columbia, but we do not enter that industry in BC, only the place where the car leaves the layout. If the car leaves through an interchange, for example the CNR in Hanover, then the CNR interchange is an industry that needs to be entered as an interchange. Shipments to yards can also be done, but yards will automatically show up to ship to, and hence do not need to be entered here.
You can also have a comment specific to each industry that will appear at the bottom of the switchlist sheet. You can use this to inform crews of special instructions with respect to that industry.
You will notice in the list at the top that each industry will be assigned an identification number, with the first characters representing the code for the town that the industry is in.
This list can be sorted by clicking on the column headings, which will then sort the list by that column’s values.