Has anyone used this program for operations planning?
http://easy-model-railroad-inventory.rclsoftware.com/index.htm
It seems like a relatively easy software to use, but I’m thinking it’s designed around smaller scales, rather than large scale.
Anyway I’d like to hear if anyone else has experience using this as I just downloaded it a couple of weeks ago and am trying to figure if this will fit my needs.
Craig
I’ve heard about it, but never looked into it. I don’t own enough rolling stock to worry about an inventory. Since most of the smaller scale operations sometimes use hundreds of cars, and would need to know the tonnage to assign motive power to a particular train, I can see where it would be useful for them.
On the operating side, I don’t really need to know what product the car is hauling or what product the customer needs or produces, just what type of car or cars would be used for that particular industry or siding and how long the car would be there being loaded or unloaded. My RR is too small to have schedules, and most of the trains are just flagged as “extras”.
But it would be interesting to hear how you like it and how useful it is for your needs.
The TrainOps software that Bob and Bruce came up with fits my needs very well.
I too don’t have a lot of equipment (35 total cars & locomotives), but I can clearly see why someone with hundreds of cars would want to keep track. I decided to input my roster so someday when I die, someone will be able to see approximately what the equipment is worth.
Back to the operations side- I’m modeling specific subdivisions and want to recreate the operations that took place. I’m interested in knowing what goes where, and the scheduling of it. I may have not found it yet, but I was kind of hoping for a automatic scheduling of cars. Say industry A gets cars with ZYX. Plug it into the program and it ‘finds’ cars that match. It does this, but its all manual.
I’m sure I will find more as I explore the program…
Craig
Craig, ““Railop”” might be a program to look for… Once set up, it will assign cars to go to industries according to type car required… Railop does not require any knowledge of what in or going into the frieght car, tho… basically, you list your freightcars and locomotives, then plan your routes for the trains you want to run, setting the stops, how many moves at that stop, etc, etc… Railop can also be setup to work loads/empties… It also can be set up with you layout diagram and used for dispatching trains… Trains can be built manually, or automatically, or a little bit of both… However, Railop is not a free program, but, if i remember correctly, it does have a ““Demo Download””… Only problem with the demo is, it doesn’t do everthing that the ““Advanced version”” does…http://www.railop.com/
Railop also has a Yahoo group…http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RailOp/
Another program that I’ve heard of, but know nothing about is called ““JMRI””… There’s another program that I heard about a long time ago, called ““Shipit””, I do believe…
Of course, like anything else, you’re the only one who can decide what is best for your situation…
There’s also Interchange, which I’ve toyed with a bunch. http://mcswiz.com/MCSMRCDS/MainPage.asp
It has very good “commodity” flow.
So I’ve found some limitations with this program, but I think it may work for what I want. The biggest limitation that I’ve found is that there is no ability to create what is known as a “interplant switch”. Say an industry has 3 spots, but cars are moved around to different spots after delivery. This program only allows the “railroad” to deliver cars and then it’s done. But I found a simple, easy solution, but it takes time. It’s simply to make each spot at the “industry” and make multiple industries. For example I have a Feed Mill called T&D Feeds that has room for 3 cars. So I’ve simply created T&D Feeds Spot 1, T&D Feeds Spot 2, T&D Feeds Spot 3. This allows the program to move cars from one spot to another. A simple solution but not exactly what I was looking for.
Even though this program isn’t exactly what I’m looking for I think it will give me an opportunity for me to plan out operations on my non existent layout. Then when the layout gets designed and built the operations aspect can be used to design parts of the layout. Yard A will need to have X capacity, while Yard B will need to have Y capacity.
Craig