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…