From the main screen, select Shipments. This form allows you to manage all aspects of shipments. You create shipments here, you view their history of execution, and you can view various aspects of shipments. From here there are these tabs:
Create/Edit: This is where you create, as explained in step 6. To edit a shipment select the industry from the left most tree which will show all the shipments out from that industry in a list below the From Industry tree. Selecting one of those shipments will bring up all the details of that shipment. You can change anything you want of this shipment and press the Update Shipment button.
You can also use an existing shipment as a template for another shipment. For example, if you want a grain shipment to be on both Mondays and Wednesdays, create the Monday shipment, select it, change the day to Wednesday and press the Create Shipment button again.
Shipment List: Is a list of all the shipments you defined in the database. You can sort the list by clicking on the column headers to see things differently.
You will note the colour legend, records in this list will be in the colour so indicated. This will make it easier for you to spot the various types of shipments. Selecting a shipment and hitting the Edit Shipment button will allow you to change this shipment in the Create/Edit tab.
Flow: This is a really neat way to see what's coming in and what's going out for every industry. Find an industry by selecting it in the left tree. You will see in the list on the top right all the shipments coming into that industry. In the bottom list you will see all the shipments going out of that industry. Clicking on any one of those shipments will jump you to that industry and it's inbound and outbound shipments. It's a really neat way to follow the flow of shipments from place to place.
Matrix: This grid displays industries by their codes in both the columns and rows. The intersecting cells show that there is at least one shipment between those two industries. Clicking on a cell will display those shipments in the list below.
Frequency: This grid displays the number of shipments potentially for each train for each frequency. A number of filters are available; just make a sentence to make the filter.
Staging Yards: Because staging yards are limited by the "what goes in must come out" dictum (see Staging Yards for details), this is the place to go to try and balance out your staging yards. This is quite involved and requires more explanation to do this right. See the page Managing Staging Trains.
Industry Shipments: This lists by industry by each frequency, how many shipments are supposed to happen.
Clicking on any cell with numbers will display a list of those shipments. Thus for any given day, when you run trains, you will be able to see if the shipments are actually happening. (See Car Limitations for further explanation as to why cars may not move when they are supposed to). You can view the list with respect to either inbound shipments or outbound shipments (Button top right). This list is printable.
Executed: Select a shipment from the Shipments List tab and this will show the complete log history of every execution of that shipment. The car number used, the date and the train will be listed for each log record.
Available Cars: Select a shipment from the Shipments List tab and this will show every car on the layout that can fulfill that shipment as it's primary commodity. You'll see the car number, type, what it's currently carrying and it's location. You can also toggle to see secondary commodity ability cars for that shipment.
Done Per Industry: For any selected industry, see the history of inbound and outbound shipments, including the date it happened, and the car that carried the shipment.
Route Shipments: For any given route see all the shipments that can happen for any frequency. This will allow you to see if you are overloading a particular route with shipments. Bear in mind that overlapping routes will show the same shipments and skew your perspective.
Missing: This lists by three possibilities missing shipments for industries. Those missing inbound shipments, those missing outbound shipments and those missing both. It's quite likely that industries will have only inbound or only outbound shipments, but the one's in the both list should concern you as they have nothing happening at all.