AAR Types

[FCIN]

(...) in case I lose all my hair and my grey matter starts leaking out my ears because of Ship It.

Don't let that happen! It may work out okay for your layout operations. If it gets to the point that you are going bald - try using Car Cards. I plan on giving that a try myself, but actually I plan on just making up a simple demurrage sheet to keep track of what cars are placed for what shipper and when and then use the simple 24 hours to load and 48 hours to unload formula and use that information to make up switch lists. One neat thing about a model railroad is that not only do you get to be conductor and/or engineer, you also can assume the role of railroad agent and shipper too.

The first thing I realized when I got ShipIt, was I was going to have a problem with wrong car types being sent to industries if I only used the AAR Mech Desig. Example: All Covered Hoppers are AAR type "LO", but that doesn't begin to tell the program what type of covered hopper it is. If I used only the AAR code "LO" then I'd have cars suitable only for plastic pellets being used for grain and vice-versus. Same thing can happen with box cars. If it's an "XM" is it 40ft or 50ft? If a customer only loads 50ft cars, they sure don't want a 40ft spotted! Box cars can be broken down into "XM", "XL", "XF", "XP", etc. but that still doesn't solve all potential issues.

First thing I did was use a simplified UMLER type code for each car type rather than the AAR Desg. That seems to have corrected that problem, but also created a lot more set up work in ShipIt - especially if the same type of car can be used for more than one commodity.

Of course if you only have a few car types, say all the same type covered hoppers, then using the AAR Mech Desig should work okay in ShipIt. But when you add all the different type cars there are and the fact that some can only be used for specific commodities, then it gets complicated and you'll start pulling out your hair! The Athearn ore car you were inquiring about is another good example. A type "GT" can also be a gon that you'd load scrap in so if you have both types of cars, you sure wouldn't want an ore loading only car spotted for scrap loading.

On my simple temporary switching layout that I was experimenting using ShipIt on, I would create several sessions worth of switchlists at one time and got to noticing that some cars would repeatedly come on line, while others seemed to never move, even though I had matching car type, commodity, shippers and consignees. Not sure what was causing that, but it was very frustrating.

Just my experiences - don't give up on it yet! Like the ShipIt manual suggests - start simple and if it's working okay, then add to it.