Rich Feature Set
General Features
· Unlimited Towns
· Unlimited Routes
· Unlimited Trains
· Unlimited Rolling Stock
· Unlimited Number of Industries
· Unlimited Locomotives
· Unlimited number and complexity of shipments
· Unlimited shipments to industries on different routes or branch lines
· Supports interchanges, staging yards and fiddle yards for shipments in and off the layout
· Both Industry and Passing sidings can be in either scale feet or number of cars
· Networkable, have as many connected computers to the database as you need
· Tag any industry to be shipped by any specific train
· Diagnostics which evaluates your data for inconsistencies with recommended fixes.
· Operates on a date basis, not a session basis. This allows you to run any number of trains at any time.
· Support for modular layouts (each modular configuration is a route)
· Yard track classification supported for car destinations.
Shipment Features
· Ship by day, week, month, season, random
· Random shipments can be given a probability from 10 to 90%
· Cars stay days you set to be filled or emptied, or train waits while car is filled/emptied
· Shipments are tagged to the primary commodity of a car, with secondary commodity when needed
· Tag unit trains to a specific shipment
· Tag commodity trains to specific commodity
· Create one-time shipments at any time
· Create cascading shipments from location, to location using one car
· Perform through freight shipments between any two yards
· View shipments from many angles (frequency by industry, number per route, balance staging yards)
· View shipments as a flow from industry to industry, so as to maintain consistency of shipments
· View shipments on an industry vs frequency so you can easily see what should be shipped on any given day
· Ability to find empty cars anywhere on the layout to fulfill shipments (both automatic and manual)
· Easy-to-read Switchlist Sheets that show where cars are to be picked up and dropped off, along with route restrictions and switching notes about industries. It also shows the locomotives picked, their DCC channels, and the length and weight of the train.
Rolling Stock Features
· View how many cars of each type for each commodity noting the number needed for shipments
· Cars can ship a primary commodity, as well as any number of secondary commodities as you wish
· Can assign an off layout location for foreign cars when empty. This is a manual shipment when trains are run.
· Automatically have cars slated for maintenance after a predefined number of moves.
· Tracks missing or lost cars.
· Tracks orphaned cars.
· Manually assign a shipment to any car to "seed" your layout.
Train Features
· Run extra trains to relocate full or empty cars to any required location
· Manually add empty cars to any train to drop off at destination yard.
· Manually add cabooses or MOW to any train.
· Local switchlists for local locomotives preceding incoming trains.
· Tag trains to switch specific industries. Cars can be dropped off at a town yard for further delivery.
· Tag trains to visit yards or not. With ability to set Drop Off Only or Pick Up Only of cars for any visited yard.
· Standard-sized waybills for each car moved (though not needed in Absolute Dispatch Management)
· Unable to place a car because an industry is full? Then place the car anywhere you want. The next train will have that car in its Switchlist.
· Passenger train consist setup, including scheduling meets and exchanges of consist with other passenger trains. Easy to read consist list printed for each passenger train you run.
· Trains returning from staging yards are assigned layout shipments
· Section a train into two or more when too many cars are being moved for any train
· Wide variation of trains to and from staging yards, handling car assignments accordingly
Interchange Features
· Exchange shipments with other layouts running this software.
· Two modes of interchanging, virtual and physical. Virtual interchanging is done without physically moving cars to the other layouts. Cars in yards that match up to the shipments being done will be assigned. This allows for distant layouts to interchange by e-mailing the interchange file, or interchanging with layouts of other scales. Physical interchanging requires the cars to physically be placed on other layouts. The program keeps track of all these "foreign" cars on everyone's layouts.
Administrative Features
· Import and export database to various ACSII file formats.
· Manage car loads returning from staging yards to balance car types in with car types out, including manual intervention of a staged train.
· Event Logging, including:
Tracking history of movements for every car and locomotive
Tracking the number of shipments going in and out for every industry
Tracking the number and last date of each shipment
Logging your own maintenance history for rolling stock and locomotives
· Prototype and simulate activity for any historical date. Move that date forward in one of three methods:
In sync with actual time (date moves forward for each day in real time),
Increase the date every time the app fires up (next day for each startup on a new real day)
Or increase the date manually. Regardless of the default date advance, you can advance the date manually
any time.
· Generate more than 25 reports on the status of your layout.
· Create realistic, deployable schedules for your trains (this is NOT required to run any train in the program, it's simply an additional feature, should you choose to use it)
· Graphically see train meets at any location on the layout (easier than the spread sheet version)
· Includes a fully functional demo layout of an actual railroad line
· Reset your layout to start over at any time
Three modes of operation
· Simple Dispatch Management (SDM - freeware)
· Relative Dispatch Management (RDM)
· Absolute Dispatch Management (ADM)
Simple Dispatch Management:
This mode is freeware. You have full capability to enter all your layout data as per the other two modes. However, you are restricted to just running scheduled trains. Once a train is run, you will get only a waybill printed. It is up to you to fulfill the waybills. You cannot print switchlists. There is no ability to make schedules, print reports or view event logs. Nor can you enter maintenance data for your locomotives and rolling stock. You can move to other modes by purchasing the program’s key.
Relative Dispatch Management:
This mode requires you to perform shipments based on a car type and not a specific car number. You will need to print waybills so that you can write the car number you decide to move. The program still tracks rolling stock by car numbers, but the program will generate those internal numbers for you.
Absolute Dispatch Management:
This mode requires the assigning and storing of rolling stock car numbers. That is, when a switchlist tells the operator to move a specific car number, then that is the car to be moved (including empties). Using this mode you do not need to print out waybills, but you can if you wish.
Note, unlimited is only to the extent that the database is less than 1 gig in size, which will take some 4 million records to reach!