Using The ShipIt! Computer Program On An ISL

[FCIN]

This subject orginally came up in the Topic: AAR Car Types http://www.the-gauge.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=3680, where tetters was using the ShipIt computer program for his layout. I don't know if anyone else on here has tried to use ShipIt on an ISL, but here's a run down on my experiences with it and how I've set it up.

Although I had tried to use ShipIt some in the past, with less than satisfactory results, I thought I'd give it try again to see if I could get it to work with an Industrial Switching Layout and reasonably duplicate the type of activity you'd have on such an operation.

The first and MOST IMPORTANT part of the initial program set up, was to create a simplified UMLER type car code to use instead of the AAR Mech Desig. Trying to use only the AAR codes will not work right on modern era layouts. There are just too many car type variations. I know that working as a brakeman/conductor, it really doesn't matter that WRWK 5055 is a B314, but it is more than a little helpful to know that the car you're looking for in a long cut is a box car and not a flat car or covered hopper. ShipIt requires that some sort of car type code be used and the AAR Car Type field seems to accept most anything, so might as well use something that resembles what the prototype uses on waybills and computer generated switch lists in many cases.

If all your cars were of the same general types with little or no variation, then the AAR Mech Desig might work fine. But on a modern era layout, it won't. For instance here we have WRWK 5055, an XM box car. Okay, fine. I input the car SCAC and number and select AAR code XM. BUT, is it 40ft/50ft/60ft - Single sliding door/Plug Door/Double Door (plug or sliding)/Combination Door - Hi-cube - etc.? A box car isn't just a box car. ShipIt has a field for Car Style, but that doesn't do a thing when it generates a switch list. Of course you have several AAR designations for box cars, such as XF, XMI, XML, XL, XLI, XP, but the same issues apply.

If you're really into prototype operations, you need a way to differentiate the types of cars and their numerous configurations. I mentioned in the other thread that you can end up with the wrong car types spotted at industries if for example, all your covered hoppers are simply AAR type LO. Perhaps you don't care if a covered hopper suitable only for loading plastic pellets is spotted at your grain elevator? Being a former railroader, I do care.

I maintain a database of all my cars that along with other information shows the AAR Mech Desg and the correct UMLER code, obtained from the Official Railway Equipment Register, but for ShipIt I made up codes that are as generalized as possible. By the way, the ORER is a good way to discover that the new car you purchased has the wrong car number for that car type!

My equipment code types are:

B - Box Cars
C - Covered Hopper Cars
F - Flat Cars
R - Refrigerator Cars/Insulated Box Cars
T - Tank Cars

For simplicity, I currently have all box cars as car type code B - rather than A for equipped cars and B for unequipped, this may need to be changed for some situations, but for now this seems to work okay for my industries and lessens some of the complexity of setting up ShipIt.

For box/refrigerator cars, the first number denotes the basic car length and the next two numbers are used to define door type or other factors you may need.

B501 - 50ft box car single sliding door
B502 - 50ft box car single plug door
B503 - 50ft box car double sliding door
B504 - 50ft box car double plug door
B505 - 50ft box car combination plug/sliding doors
Similar codes can be added as required for 40ft, 60ft, 86ft, hi-cube cars, etc.

All the covered hoppers that I will be using are of the same general class and capacity, so they use code:
C101 - Covered Hopper Gravity Discharge

Flat Cars
F101 - 60ft Bulkhead

Refrigerator Cars/Insulated Box Cars
R501 - Insulated Box Car (RBL)
R502 - Mechanical Refrigerator (RPL)

Tank Cars
T101 - 16,000-18,000 gal
T102 - 25,000-27,000 gal

When setting up ShipIt, I only needed two towns - one which I call CITY and that contains only A-YARD (actually staging/off line car storage) and the other called SPUR that has all the industries. I chose the name A-Yard so that if I print out the condensed switch list form, cars coming from the yard will list first. ShipIt lists industries, tracks, yards, etc. in alphabetical order at each station/town.

The shipping point for all cars destined to the industrial spur is A-YARD. No need to create a shipper that is supposed to be in some far off city, state. That just adds unnecessary complexity to setting up the program for an ISL.

Since the industries on my ISL all have two or more car spots, the next thing that I had to do, was set up the program so that each car spot was treated like a separate industry. Required if certain type cars must be placed at certain spots. Otherwise, you can end up with wrong car types at specific spots. If Spot 2 is only for tank car unloading, you wouldn't want to spot a box car for unloading there!

Industry Setup Example: BCI (Beverage Corporation International) receives tank cars of HFCS and has two car spots. So I set up my spots for that consignee as industries BCI 1 and BCI 2.

Now is when the fun begins! For each of my HFCS tank cars (Code T101), I will have to make a shipper/consignee pair for each of those spots (7 cars X 2 car spots = 14 shipper/consignee pairs!). In this particular instance, I could have just made BCI an industry that spots two cars and it would work well enough, but I want the switch list to show that a particular car is to be placed/pulled at a certain spot.

You can see where this is going when you have an industry that has as many as 6 car spots and each spot can receive several different type cars and commodities or, certain spots are only for certain commodities/car types. So for each commodity, you must create a shipper/consignee pair for each car type that can realistically transport that commodity. IT'S VERY TIME CONSUMING!

I started out simple using only the 16 cars that were currently on the layout. I have most of the shipper/consignee/commodity/car pairs set up except for a logistics warehouse that has 6 car spots and who knows how many commodity/car type combinations. For now, I just set it up for one commodity and 3 suitable box car types.

Here is how ShipIt is working so far:

1. To begin - I selected Start Fresh (New Car Positions) to initialize the program and ShipIt placed 5 cars on spot at the industries on SPUR and the remaining 11 cars in the A-YARD.

2. Selecting Generate Session yielded the following results:

Session 1:
No cars inbound from A-YARD
5 cars outbound from SPUR

Session 2:
3 inbound cars from A-YARD
No outbound cars from SPUR

Continued generation of test operating sessions (20 total) kept yielding the same pattern. Nothing Inbound/3 Outbound then 3 Inbound/Nothing Outbound. But the industries switched did vary, at least as much as they could with the available car types and commodities.

I don't consider this a fair test of the program at this point, as the program is working with only the few car types that I have entered - 2 tank cars - 1 flat - 3 covered hoppers - 10 box cars of various types. If I add more cars to the program, it should change operating patterns considerably. At least I hope it would.

I should note that I have inbound/outbound train lengths limited to 5 cars maximum - the capacity of my staging track. I'm not sure what effect, if any, that has on the program operation, but is a limit that I have imposed to keep staging to a reasonable amount. Only the addition of many more cars will show if that limit effects the program in a negative way.

I would also need to experiment with the amount of time that cars are on spot for various industries and the frequency of car orders. As currently set up, I use the default of 24 hours for every commodity and some cars should take longer to unload and the frequency of shipments should be adjusted for some commodities too. As on the prototype, just because you have 5 industries, doesn't mean that each of them would receive cars every operating session, nor would each industry be switched every session.

My past experience using ShipIt, I found that some cars never seemed to come on line from storage for certain commodities, while others would constantly come on/off line. I'm guessing that the car database doesn't queue the cars in a first out/last in manner after a car has completed a shipping cycle. If AA 2050 is in position 1 in the database and WRWK 5055 is in position 100 - maybe that never changes. If both cars were the correct type for the shipment and available at the same time, WRWK 5055 might never get selected in a situation like I'm using.

With my current car fleet of 100 cars, do I want to spend the hours and hours required to create shipper/consignee/commodity/car type pairs, not to mention the time that may be required to get the program to function in a prototypical manner?

ShipIt appears to require a LOT of fine tuning - which translates to a lot of time sitting at the computer inputting data and trying to make it work right. Some other method, such as the good old Car Card/Waybill system and switch lists made up from those may be the best route to take. Even just making up a switch list based on the mood I'm in at the time may work better than ShipIt for an ISL.

I know that some of you will no doubt consider all this as taking things to the extreme, and some probably wouldn't even care if the correct car types where used for shipments, but it's what I found necessary to do to get this program to roughly duplicate prototype switch lists for an industrial switching job. As time permits, I will continue to experiment with ShipIt, but I've already spent more hours than I want to know getting to this point! Not sure that it's worth all this effort.

[Gary S]

Thank you for taking the time to write all that up. It is something I am definitely interested in, so please keep us informed of how the program is working as you change and add things. I do like the way you coded your rolingstock, makes sense to me. I probably wouldn't distinguish between the door types on the boxcars, but would distinguish 40s and 50s.

My past experience using ShipIt, I found that some cars never seemed to come on line from storage for certain commodities, while others would constantly come on/off line. I'm guessing that the car database doesn't queue the cars in a first out/last in manner after a car has completed a shipping cycle. If AA 2050 is in position 1 in the database and WRWK 5055 is in position 100 - maybe that never changes. If both cars were the correct type for the shipment and available at the same time, WRWK 5055 might never get selected in a situation like I'm using.

Definitely keep us informed of how this is going. If the random generator is not random and constantly uses the same cars instead of running through the fleet, and doesn't have much variation in the amount of cars incoming/outgoing for each operating session, then that pretty much ruins it for me.

As for the amount of time spent entering all the data, I think it will be worth it in the long run, as long as the program generates some variation. It will savetons of time further down the line.

[tetters]

FCIN,

Your post is incredibly helpful. I've been scratching my head trying to get the shipper / consignee thing sorted out. Plus getting cars from A to B. I keep getting the diagnostic error that says cars cannot get from A to B.

The best example I can give you is that I'd like to be able to move cars off of my car float, possibly store some in the yard for a local freight to deliver to a town off layout (staging cassette) plus have some freight in the yard as well as off the float delivered to the local industries in town. Of course, some industries will produce products that can either be shipped back to the car float, or to off layout staging.

By what I've read in your post is that I should set up the car float (West) as one Town, the Layout itself as another Town with its individual industries and then the staging cassette (East) as a third Town. Is that the general idea?

I'd also be interested to know how you set your train schedule. Being a civilian as opposed to a railroader in real life I am confused as to how to tell ship it to use my "train"?

[FCIN]

Gary S and tetters;

Boy have I hit a snag with ShipIt!

This evening I added the rest of my cars to the roster, made sure I had at least one shipper/consignee/commodity pairing for each car type and then proceeded to test it some more.

When I initialized the program (Fresh Start) it placed cars at every one of my industry spots and the remainder in the yard - that was fine, and what I expected. So then I started generating test switch lists to see what would happen with these results:
Session 1: 0 cars inbound from the yard - 5 cars outbound from the spur
Session 2: 0 cars inbound from the yard - 5 cars outbound from the spur
Session 3: 0 cars inbound from the yard - 5 cars outbound from the spur
Session 4: 0 cars inbound from the yard - 1 car outbound from the spur
After the 4th session, it would no longer generate a switch list saying that there were "No consignee shipper matches found"!!!
Arghhhhhhhhhhhhh!
It shows that all the cars in the yard are STUCK for some reason that I can't determine. Why it is not moving cars both directions I don't know. I've looked at everything I know to look at in the program and can't figure out why I'm not getting cars moved from the yard to the spur and back again.
I'm going to try some different things and see if that changes it. I sure would hate to have to enter all the shipper/consignee records again! Maybe I need to treat my set up as if everything were in the same town/station.

Will keep you posted.

UPDATE !!!

I think I've found the problem!! When setting up your shippers there is an option on the dialog box to enter a Storage Yard - for overflow of cars I think. When I set up my shippers, I entered the shipping point A-YARD into that field when I should have left it blank. Seems that because my shipping point and storage yard were the same, ShipIt would not move the cars!

Once I went though all the shipper records and cleared out the Storage Yard field (there is an option to clear that field) - then cars started moving.

Will keep you posted

[FCIN]

Well here is the latest information on my experimenting with ShipIt.

Now that I figured out what I'd done wrong (one of those Oops! moments) here is how ShipIt is working for me now:

1. Fresh Start
Placed 16 cars (1 at each spot) on spur
Remainder of cars in yard

2. Session 1
2 cars inbound from yard
5 cars outbound from spur

Session 2
4 cars inbound from yard
5 cars outbound from spur

Session 3
5 cars inbound from yard
5 cars outbound from spur

All remaining switch list generation produced same results:
5 cars inbound from yard and 5 cars outbound from spur

Since I have train length limited to 5 cars - this behavior is correct and is working just the way I want. Although I haven't figured out an easy way to keep track of the movement of individual cars - based on the number of switch lists I've generated, it does appear that all cars are moving.

Only thing that is bothering me at the moment is that I don't really want every car spot filled all the time. For instance, my distribution warehouse has 6 car spots. ShipIt has a car spotted at each door all the time and I'd prefer that there only be 2 or 3 cars on spot at any one time. Same with my food products industry that has 5 car spots. I should be able to fix this issue by adjusting the frequency of car movements for various spots. Will experiment with that.

I added a second switch job to the train list, to see how that effected operations. I have a first shift job and a third shift job and here are some results for doing that:

Session 1
First Shift
5 cars inbound from yard
5 cars outbound from spur
Third Shift
1 car inbound from yard
5 cars outbound from spur
Session 2
First Shift
5 cars inbound from yard
5 cars outbound from spur
Third Shift
5 cars inbound from yard
5 cars outbound from spur

This pattern continued for every session generated - good!

ShipIt allows you to have several trains scheduled, but not actually run them. Thus I can have three yard crews on the train list, but only generate switch lists for one of them if I only want to have one session at a time. Nice feature.

Overall, at this point I'm really being to like using ShipIt. Will have to say that I don't like the output of the switch lists. The primary switch list form wastes a lot of paper - typically printing out as many as two pages for one train. would be a lot more pages if my train lengths weren't limited. Here's an example:     It does have a Condensed switch list that uses abbreviations and looks like this:     A bit more prototypical in appearance.

One other note while I'm thinking about it. I find that ShipIt has a tendency to crash frequently. No pattern to the crashes and sometimes it will crash by simply moving a scrollbar on an open window. It has crashed once when I did a Fresh Start and once when generating a session. Crashes do not seem to effect anything as far as the database goes and restarting the program, I've been able to resume from where the point where it crashed.

[FCIN]

FCIN,
Your post is incredibly helpful.

Well I hope that my experiences are helping some. My set up of ShipIt is probably about as simple as it gets, except for the concept of making individual car spots separate industries. It is a pain in the patoot to enter all the necessary data and I'm a long way from finishing that, but have got it to the point that every industry gets switched and all the cars are moving.

(...) I'd like to be able to move cars off of my car float, possibly store some in the yard for a local freight to deliver to a town off layout (staging cassette) plus have some freight in the yard as well as off the float delivered to the local industries in town. Of course, some industries will produce products that can either be shipped back to the car float, or to off layout staging.

By what I've read in your post is that I should set up the car float (West) as one Town, the Layout itself as another Town with its individual industries and then the staging cassette (East) as a third Town. Is that the general idea?

First off, if you haven't already done so, get on the ShipIt user Yahoo Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shipit/. Should be a lot of folks on there that can help you solve problems. I'm on it, but must confess that I'm hard headed and try to work things out on my own!

I've never attempted to set up ShipIt for anything like what you want to do so right now I'm just throwing out ideas and seeing if they stick to anything. But here is an idea that I have for setting up ShipIt for your layout.

Here are the Towns and features of each as I'd set them up:
Town A - Float Yard
Town B - Yard - Industries - Interchange
Town C - Yard

Also, I'd only use one Division for the whole thing. As I recall, having towns located on different divisions adds a lot of complexity to setting up ShipIt and getting it to work correctly. I think that one of the example set ups does work that way if you want to see how it's done, but I think one division is just fine.

Town A
This is your offline staging/car storage - actually it's an arrangement exactly like what I have. Town A contains only Float Yard that has a large car capacity just to be on the safe side. All your off line shippers are actually Float Yard. Again, this is like what I've done. For example you need a shipment of feed going to a mill in Town B. Shipper is Float Yard - Consignee is the mill. You would also want to have some commodities shipped from Town A to Town C - which would create through movements. In order to get some cars to be held in Town B Yard, you'll need to remember to make Town B Yard the Storage Yard location for some or all of your shippers. I think that should work.

Town B
Town B is your main layout with your yard and industries. Any industries in Town B that ship off line would use Town A Float Yard or Town C Yard as their destination and again show Town B Yard as the Storage Yard when you set up the shipment.

The interchange track of course goes to Town C Yard.

Town C
Town C is set up like Town A - in other words - your cassette to move some cars off line and to another imaginary staging point. Again, you would use the Town C Yard as a shipping/destination point for cars and you could have shipments from Town C to Town A for through movements.

In order to get the interchange to work correctly, you may have to set up a "fake" train movement for Town C so that you move cars on and off the interchange track. I'm not 100% sure on that, but I'm thinking that has to be done. You may have to get advice from someone else about how to make the interchange work correctly. I always had problems getting interchanges to work right, but I probably just didn't set it up correctly.

Now here's where my idea gets interesting. We're going to create a train that is actually going to be your car float. You'll need a locomotive that will represent your car float.

Next we create a schedule for the car float where it goes from Town A to Town B and back again. You can schedule as many of these car float moves as you need for an operating session.

I'm assuming that for Town B, you just have a switch crew or crews that work the car float, yard, industries and interchange track. So you'd need to set up schedules for that crew or crews. That should be simple enough and should work itself out.

I'd also be interested to know how you set your train schedule. Being a civilian as opposed to a railroader in real life I am confused as to how to tell ship it to use my "train"?

Well, we'll use my example of the car float for setting up a schedule. First you set up the train. Give it a number and we'll name it Car Float. Train Type would probably be Freight as would all your train types (I'm guessing you don't run passenger service). Train Class isn't needed but you must set the train length to the capacity of your car float! Then pick a direction for the train. On the Session Generation page - be sure to click Session Generation ALL. Once you've set up the train (our car float) on the Browse Trains window select that train and click View Schedule. Insert and put in the Departure Time you want and then make the Town A - Town A. Click OK then Insert again, put in the Arrival Time and Departure Time (these times can be many hours apart) - Make the Town - Town B. Click Okay then click Insert once more. Put in your Arrival Time - make the Town - Town A and click on Return Trip. Then Click OK. That should do it.

You'll probably only need to make a single entry for your Town B crew. Just enter a Departure Time and Town B and that should be enough. You can of course create more trains and scheduled times for Town B if you like. I've done that with my set up.

Hope this makes sense to you. I'm actually tempted to use one of the examples in ShipIt and try this out for myself!

UPDATE !!!
tetters;

I've actually been playing with my idea and it needs a lot of refinement I'm sorry to say. It look's like the car float operation would have to be treated as some sort of interchange or inter-divisional move to get it to work right. As it is right now, when I scheduled the car float to go from Town A to Town B, it delivered the cars to their destinations - not what I want all all. But I think the concept may still be workable - just need to revise the way it works. I'll have to think about this some more.

[Gary S]

Even though I don't have much to add to this thread, trust me, it is very interesting. Please continue with all the thoughts and info!

Thank you for taking the time to post your experiences.

[FCIN]

Thank you for taking the time to post your experiences.

More experimenting this evening!

To see if all the effort I went through with ShipIt really made any significant difference, I decided to do a version of my set up in what I'd call the "typical" configuration that most folks would use.

Rather than treat each car spot as a separate industry, I changed it so that each industry was a single entry, but with the car capacity of the industry reflecting the number of car spots. In other words like this:
Industry A - Car Capacity 2, Industry B - Car Capacity 5, etc.

Here are the changes I noted doing this simpler configuration:

Fresh Start (initial setup) - ShipIt did not place a car at every available spot on the spur, but did have at least 1 car placed at each industry. Off to a good start there!

Then I proceeded to generate a minimum of 20 test sessions with these results:

Every switch list that was generated had 5 cars inbound to spot and 5 outbound cars to pull. Since I have my train length maximum set at 5 cars that part is fine, although I would like to have times when the number of inbound/outbound cars don't always balance. There is enough randomness that every industry isn't switched every session.

The inbound commodities were quite random, except that a few industries were receiving certain shipments more frequently than they actually would. In one case, one car and its commodity would come on line about every 4th session, but that was due to the fact that it was the only car in the fleet suitable for that commodity. I should be able to correct this situation by adjusting the shipment frequencies.

After the initial testing, I then proceeded to adjust the shipment frequency times for some commodities to see how that effected things. Adjusting shipment frequencies does make a difference, but will take a lot of experimenting to get things the way I want. I did manage to get that one car to only come on line about every 10th session (twice in 20 test runs).

The one big problem that I have with this simpler configuration, is that often I will get 2 cars inbound for a customer that should only spot at one specific location - so that I don't like.

For example, I have a lumber distributor that is setup to spot a single box car at a storage shed and/or a single bulkhead flat away from the shed. Often I'll get two box cars or two bulkhead flats inbound with this setup. In reality, you'd hold one of the cars and then spot it when the first one is empty. I can't get ShipIt to do that without each spot being treated as a separate industry. This was the main reason that I have the setup where each car spot is treated as an individual industry.

In either of my setups for ShipIt, there are features that work fine and others that won't work as I'd like. But overall, I'd say that ShipIt would work pretty well for most layouts. The program does a great job of keeping track of shipments and where your cars are at all times. It allows for quite a few adjustments if needed, such as permitting you to move a car to a different location if necessary. With all the real life variables that come in to play on the prototype, I'm not sure that any computer program would ever be able to accurately duplicate those variables.

Depending on the size of your layout and the number of cars you have, initial setup can be quite time consuming, but the end result is pretty nice, as you only need to start the program, generate your switch list(s), print them out and off you go! Each session starts from the point you last left off and I really like that.

Now if I could figure out a set up that would work right for tetters!!

ANOTHER LITTLE UPDATE !!!

Just for the fun of it - I setup a version of ShipIt based on the simple switching layout example from Lance Mindheim's new book "How To Build A Switching Layout". If you aren't familiar with this example layout he uses in the book, it's quite simple with only three spurs off the lead - A warehouse, a food processor and a team track, but has the potential for lots of operation.

I modified the design to reflect the way I'd construct it - the warehouse and food processor would each spot 4 cars and the team track (trans-load track) would spot up to 6 cars. Warehouse gets various box cars and commodities, food processor gets reffers, tank cars and box cars - trans-load handles building supplies with bulkhead flats and box cars, covered hoppers of various commodities and tank cars of HFCS.

It was extremely easy to set up this arrangement and it worked just great with ShipIt. Plenty of random car moves, and 5 cars in and out each session. Still have the potential problem of two many of one shipment being delivered (i.e.; two cars of vegetable oil when the food processor only unloads 1), but over all, it works fine. Lot's of variety to the trans-load track and at no time when I tested ShipIt, did it ever fill all the potential car spots - very realistic. Making me consider building a larger version of this layout!

[Gary S]

Been thinking on this: Seems it is important to get the numbers balanced to allow ShipIt to act in a random fashion.

Example - Our layout operations has the following characteristics:

18 industry spurs
average 2 cars per shipment
average 3 days between shipments

Note: the last two are averages - some spurs would have more cars, some less, some would ship more frequently, some less, this would all need to be calculated from the actual layout characteristics.

To calculate the number of cars switched per day, we would multply 18 by 2 and divide by 3 to get 12. We need to switch 12 cars per day to maintain the averages given. I suspect that if we use a max train length of less than 12, the train will always be maxed because the program is trying to keep up with the industry needs. We probably should make the train length greater than 12, perhaps 14 or 15. Or, if the layout won't accomadate trains that long, then we do two trains at 7 or 8 cars per train.

Hope that makes sense. Point is, we need to balance the numbers to allow the program to work as intended.

[tetters]

Thanks Ed. I'm going to have to fool around with it some more and see if I can get it to work. One problem I think I have is that I've set up too many districts. Once I eliminate them all except one, I'll see how it works. I spent a couple of days tooling with it already and need to give it a rest though.

[FCIN]

Been thinking on this: Seems it is important to get the numbers balanced to allow ShipIt to act in a random fashion.

Gary;

Not sure about having to get the numbers balanced, except as noted below. I just completed a test to answer a question or two for myself. Using my current ISL plan which has 5 industries:

Ind A - 2 car spots
Ind B - 5 car spots
Ind C - 2 car spots
Ind D - 6 car spots
Ind E - 2 car spots

This test was run using my first setup for ShipIt where each car spot is treated as a separate industry, so ShipIt thinks I actually have 17 industries. I may try it again later using the "typical" version where there are only 5 industries with the appropriate number of car spots.

I currently have 79 cars in the database (will add the rest as they get their metal wheel sets or get repainted as required for a few of them).

My train length is limited to 5 cars because of staging - so I wanted to see first and foremost if every car would come on the layout as it had seemed in the past that some never came on line.

After the Fresh Start initialization I kept generating sessions and counting the number of times that each car came on line. By session 31, EVERY car in the database had come on line at least once. Of course some cars came on line more than once and that is due to the number of appropriate cars I have for some commodities.

16 cars came on line two times in 31 sessions
15 cars came on line three times in 31 sessions
6 cars came on line four times in 31 sessions
1 car came on line five times in 31 sessions
1 car came on line six times in 31 sessions (only available car for that commodity)
All the rest made only one appearance in 31 sessions. Pretty random I'd say.

But ALL cars in the database did come on line, so obviously something wasn't right when I tried to use it in the past and that was something I really wanted to test. Glad to find out that I was wrong!

What I did notice is that since ShipIt keeps your car database in MARKS-NUMBER order, it pulls available cars of the same type in that order. For example I have 4 CNW covered hoppers of the same type, so they appeared on line, one at a time, in numerical order. In every situation where I have two or more cars of the same type, they would always appear in numerical order. Cars of the same type, but with different marks, will come on line by mark, then number order, so GATX 4470 will come on line before LSIX 144.

It appears that ShipIt attempts to fill car orders for each industry every time you create a session, but of course my limited train length won't allow it to do so, and therefore car orders pile up, but they do get delivered. I'd guess that if my train length matched the available number of car spots, then ShipIt would attempt to furnish cars for each industry every time assuming there were orders to be filled for each industry.

I made no adjustments to the car order frequency in this test either, using the default value of 24 hours for everything. I would also say that if I had it setup to run two or three trains in a 24 hour period (1st, 2nd, 3rd shift yard jobs), that it would have made a big difference in filling the car orders.

I didn't attempt to keep track of how many times a car was spotted at a particular spot - too time consuming, but in general, it appeared that at the two industries with more than 2 car spots, something got placed at each spot at least once.

One thing I have noticed for this type of setup, is that I have at least two customers that should be receiving one or two cars every day, and that doesn't happen. There are options in ShipIt to give individual shipments higher priority than others and of course to adjust the frequency of shipments too, but I haven't really ventured much into doing that.

What I'll probably have to do is setup ShipIt with the configuration where there are only 5 industries with the appropriate number of car spots for each, set shipment priorities and frequencies and just forget about the switch list indicating to spot cars at specific locations. Not the way I'd like, but workable. Just would have to figure out a way to keep excess cars from coming on line for car spots that can only handle one of that type of car at a time. I may still have to setup some specific car spots as separate industries, to prevent that from happening. More testing!

One thing that has really made ShipIt work better for me, was creating and using simplified UMLER type codes for the cars rather than the AAR designations. It does require you to make a lot more shipper/consignee/commodity pairings, but it's worth the extra effort for realistic operation.

---- tetters ----

As you can see from reading my recent posts, ShipIt does require a lot of fine-tuning and experimenting with various ways to set it up. At this stage of the game, I'm pretty sure that I'm going to use it for my layout, once it's officially in operation. I have been playing around some with it, by generating sessions with a limited number of cars on the temporary track setup and am fairly pleased with the results. I really like the convenience of using this program rather than trying to keep track of everything myself - even though I don't mind wearing the Freight Agent's hat in addition to being conductor/brakeman/engineer. :-)

[Gary S]

Ed, good to hear that the program used all the cars and that things worked out well. I don't really like that the cars get pulled from the "available pool" in alphanumeric order though. Still, can live with it.

Seems that the way you have it set up with all industries on a 24 hour period, it is the limited train length that makes each operating session different, albeit every session will have the train completely full at 5 cars. As you said, with a long enough train length, every spot would be filled every session, because of the 24 hour frequency for each industry.

For some reason, having the incoming train length change somewhat is important to me. I think that setting up the industries with different frequencies and then running a train or enough trains to exceed the number of cars needed on average each session would provide some randomness in the number of cars per train. For me, I would want some days to be "light days" and other days to be "heavy days".

Keep up the great work!

[FCIN]

Seems that the way you have it set up with all industries on a 24 hour period, it is the limited train length that makes each operating session different, albeit every session will have the train completely full at 5 cars. As you said, with a long enough train length, every spot would be filled every session, because of the 24 hour frequency for each industry.

Gary, adjusting the default times for shipments is something that I really need to experiment with. If you use the default "Demurrage Rules" of 24 hours to load/48 hours to unload and change the frequency of some shipments, that should make a lot of difference.

I did experiment with setting the train length to a value higher than the maximum possible car spots and sure enough, ShipIt pretty much placed and pulled a car for every spot, every session. Adjusting the load/unload times would no doubt have changed that significantly.

For some reason, having the incoming train length change somewhat is important to me.

I think that once car move frequencies are adjusted, that might work itself out. However, ShipIt does give you the option to adjust the train length for your train(s) prior to generating a session, so that could be an option you might want to use from time to time. Where I have my train length set to 5 cars - I could set it to 2 cars and generate a list based on that. The result would be 2 cars inbound and 2 outbound for that session. Only problem with doing that is, say you only wanted to pull a car or two from your industries and not spot anything - no way to adjust that as far as I can see.

Here is one thing about ShipIt that IS really bugging me. The way it prints out the cars on the switch lists. Here's an example of the listing for the inbound train where I was playing around with the longer train length value:     First, looking at the Road and Number fields you can see what I mean about the alphanumeric order. You don't notice it so much just glancing at the list, but if you look closely, you can see the pattern: A, B, C, L, M, P, T, W. Both of my CNA cars with the same commodity/destination and all 3 of my BN box cars (2 with the same commodity/destination) made it on to this train. Not un-prototypical by any means, but as you, I'd like it to be a bit more random.

But here is the main issue. If you look at the Destination field, you can see that the cars are not arranged in blocks by industry, but rather listed in random order. The cars should be blocked in order by industry! You wouldn't leave the yard with your cars in a random fashion like that. If I actually lined up the inbound train per this list, it would be a mess to work the industries!

Of course if you actually had the yard to work before leaving your initial terminal, then you could use this printout to switch your cars and block them in to the proper order. Probably a good situation for a lot of layouts.

However, now look at the page(s) where the work is to be done on the spur, the cars are blocked by industry as they should be:     The bold notations on this example were added by me, but you see that this looks more or less like a prototype switch list, however, I think it would be a bit more prototypical to have the cars to be spotted listed before the cars to be pulled. Better yet, I'd have the work for each industry listed separately. But to get ShipIt to do that, it looks like in my case, I'd have to make each industry its own town!!! ANOTHER idea for an experimental setup!

I wish that ShipIt would list the cars for the inbound train in the same order as they are on this example (starting with ADMX 15818 midway down the page. Were I actually going to stage and operate this session, I'd just ignore the first page and block the train as per the car Set Out field on this page.

You'll also notice that ShipIt is listing industries in alphabetical order and the blocking does not match how I'd have the train blocked. Guess you need to pick names/abbreviations for your industries that would result in proper blocking of the cars or in my case, possibly treat each industry as its own town!

I know that in most cases, it wouldn't matter so much how the cars were blocked on many types of layouts or train situations, just not what I'd want for my layout. If I were running a local freight through 3 towns with only one or two industries to be worked in each town, then ShipIt would work well in that case. For example, if you had one car to spot and one car to pull at Town A, then ShipIt would show each town separately and only the cars to be worked for that town.

Well back to more experimenting. Not getting any modeling or layout work done right now, but this is interesting. It's quite obvious that ShipIt must be set up and fine tuned for each individual layout and operating theme. But there does seem to be ways to get it to work the way you want for the most part. Just have to play with it and think outside of the box.

[Gary S]

My thoughts in this thread are based on what little research I have done on operations, and on my intuition. I'm glad that you are interested in the subject and can provide an insider's view into making the ShipIt program work well. There are certainly things that are being discussed that are going over my head, but the way to solve that is to keep thinking about all this. I did download the trial version of ShipIt 6 and will play with it over the next few weeks.

However, ShipIt does give you the option to adjust the train length for your train(s) prior to generating a session, so that could be an option you might want to use from time to time. Where I have my train length set to 5 cars - I could set it to 2 cars and generate a list based on that. The result would be 2 cars inbound and 2 outbound for that session. Only problem with doing that is, say you only wanted to pull a car or two from your industries and not spot anything - no way to adjust that as far as I can see.

Good to hear that the train length can be adjusted for each session. Now, it seems that with the industry frequency all set the same, and with a train too short to meet the industry demands, there would always be a maximum number of setouts and pickups on each train as the program is doing its best to keep up with industry needs. I wonder if setting various frequencies and then having enough trans and long enough trains to exceed what is needed for the industries would result in variations between pickups and setouts. Seems that it would.

Here's an example of the listing for the inbound train where I was playing around with the longer train length value: First, looking at the Road and Number fields you can see what I mean about the alphanumeric order. You don't notice it so much just glancing at the list, but if you look closely, you can see the pattern: A, B, C, L, M, P, T, W. Both of my CNA cars with the same commodity/destination and all 3 of my BN box cars (2 with the same commodity/destination) made it on to this train. Not un-prototypical by any means, but as you, I'd like it to be a bit more random.

Hmmm.... let's use boxcars as an example: Say we have an available boxcar roster of 20 ATG (my shortline) cars, 10 ATSF cars, 5 BN cars, 4 EGE cars, 1 FEC car, 4 LN cars and 10 SP cars - ShipIt would run through all my shortline cars, then through the ATSF cars, then the BN cars etc? If my train length was set to 10 cars, then all of the boxcars on the first train in the first ops session would be ATG? I don't like that at all!

If my conjecture is true, one way to combat that would be to place a random lower case letter and then a space in front of every one of the boxcar roadnames. But that wold be rather crappy on the switchlists, having the random letter there.

If you look at the Destination field, you can see that the cars are not arranged in blocks by industry, but rather listed in random order. The cars should be blocked in order by industry! You wouldn't leave the yard with your cars in a random fashion like that. If I actually lined up the inbound train per this list, it would be a mess to work the industries!

Haven't ever used a switchlist, but how are they typically odered in the real world? I mean, is the first car on the list the first car in the train? Would the pickups be arranged in the order that they will be enountered out on the rails? I just don't know anything about how to use a switchlist.

Of course if you actually had the yard to work before leaving your initial terminal, then you could use this printout to switch your cars and block them in to the proper order. Probably a good situation for a lot of layouts.

If a class 1 is dropping off cars to interchange with my little shortline, (like the LAJ for example) then they would be in a random order at the interchange, right? And my shortline would then try to block the cars to make the setouts as easy as possible? And having the switchlist in order by industry would help with that, right?

However, now look at the page(s) where the work is to be done on the spur, the cars are blocked by industry as they should be:[ATTACHMENT NOT FOUND]The bold notations on this example were added by me, but you see that this looks more or less like a prototype switch list, however, I think it would be a bit more prototypical to have the cars to be spotted listed before the cars to be pulled. Better yet, I'd have the work for each industry listed separately. But to get ShipIt to do that, it looks like in my case, I'd have to make each industry its own town!!! ANOTHER idea for an experimental setup![/quote]

So instead of operating from the switchlist, would you work from the list above?

You'll also notice that ShipIt is listing industries in alphabetical order and the blocking does not match how I'd have the train blocked. Guess you need to pick names/abbreviations for your industries that would result in proper blocking of the cars or in my case, possibly treat each industry as its own town!

Again, the trick of using a lower case letter (or how about a number, 01, 02, etc) and a space in front of the industry names would "trick" the program into listing them in the right order. Again we deal with having the letter on the switchlist. And with my layout having interchanges on both ends, one of the lists would be backwards.

Using individual towns sounds interesting. Even though my layout is one town, each of the industrial parks would need to be set as a town I suspect.

I know that in most cases, it wouldn't matter so much how the cars were blocked on many types of layouts or train situations, just not what I'd want for my layout. If I were running a local freight through 3 towns with only one or two industries to be worked in each town, then ShipIt would work well in that case. For example, if you had one car to spot and one car to pull at Town A, then ShipIt would show each town separately and only the cars to be worked for that town.

More reasons for me to set the industrial parks as towns.

Well back to more experimenting. Not getting any modeling or layout work done right now, but this is interesting. It's quite obvious that ShipIt must be set up and fine tuned for each individual layout and operating theme. But there does seem to be ways to get it to work the way you want for the most part. Just have to play with it and think outside of the box.

Keep thinking and posting!

[FCIN]

Wow! Where to begin!!

I did download the trial version of ShipIt 6 and will play with it over the next few weeks.

I have the newest version (7.01), but I don't think that there are any significant differences between these versions as far as the program setup and operation goes, so anything I talk about in this experimental stuff should work okay for you.

Good to hear that the train length can be adjusted for each session. (...) I wonder if setting various frequencies and then having enough trans and long enough trains to exceed what is needed for the industries would result in variations between pickups and setouts. Seems that it would.

I've been experimenting a lot during the night with adjusting the load/unload times and shipment frequencies and it does make a big difference! Still will have to play around with the settings for various shipments, but it seems to be making a lot of difference in what happens when you generate a switch list. More on that later...

Hmmm.... let's use boxcars as an example: Say we have an available boxcar roster of 20 ATG (my shortline) cars, 10 ATSF cars, 5 BN cars, 4 EGE cars, 1 FEC car, 4 LN cars and 10 SP cars - ShipIt would run through all my shortline cars, then through the ATSF cars, then the BN cars etc? If my train length was set to 10 cars, then all of the boxcars on the first train in the first ops session would be ATG? I don't like that at all!

Now this one is really hard to answer and may require some more information to get a better idea of what might happen. But first, are all your box cars the same type? Are they 40ft, 50ft, single door, double door, plug door, combination door? And would every shipper/consignee on your layout use the same type of box car? As I've mention several times before, some cars are not suitable for certain commodities, and other commodities might be suitable for several different types of cars. As a simple example, say you are shipping lumber in box cars. If your layout is set in the modern era (late 1960's on) you'd want to use double door cars for such shipments, although single wide door type cars would be acceptable.

This is where my use of a car code to differentiate the types of comes comes in to play and why using the outdated AAR Mech Desg won't work right. If you simply used the default ShipIt AAR types and designated all your box cars as XM, then yes, I can see where ShipIt might run through all your home road cars (ATG) first and on down the line alphabetically if all the potential destinations received the XM type of car. I'd really have to test this out to make sure, but right now, I'd say your theory is probably correct.

If my conjecture is true, one way to combat that would be to place a random lower case letter and then a space in front of every one of the boxcar roadnames. But that wold be rather crappy on the switchlists, having the random letter there.

ShipIt will not allow you to enter lowercase letters in the reporting marks field, but did test it and it will permit you to have spaces before the reporting marks. I was able to input the same car marks and number that way. But it will also allow you to enter the same car marks and number more than once (not good - the program should flag an error like that).

Haven't ever used a switchlist, but how are they typically odered in the real world? I mean, is the first car on the list the first car in the train? Would the pickups be arranged in the order that they will be enountered out on the rails? I just don't know anything about how to use a switchlist.

This one requires several explanations. As there are train consists and switch lists.

A train consist is a list of all the cars in your train and is almost always listed from the first to last car (although I've seen it done in reverse in some instances). If the train consist included cars to be set off in route, these cars would usually be placed at the head end of the train and in the order they were to be set off. These days, if you were departing your initial terminal with a local freight, then the cars would be blocked in the order by the towns that you were going to work along the way and the consist provided to you would be listed in that order.

A switch list, is what is says it is; a list of cars that are to be switched out at a particular location. This can be a yard, where cars are to be sorted and blocked for further movement and it can be a list of what cars are to be placed/pulled at various industries at that location.

The way that switch lists (and consists too for that matter) are made up, is that some poor soul (the agent or yard clerk) must walk every track and list all the cars in that track. Cars on each track are listed from the same end. From this initial "yard or track check", the agent/clerk can make up the required switch lists for the crew(s) and they will not only know what cars are in what track, they will know which end of the track they are on and the cars position in the track.

If a class 1 is dropping off cars to interchange with my little shortline, (like the LAJ for example) then they would be in a random order at the interchange, right? And my shortline would then try to block the cars to make the setouts as easy as possible? And having the switchlist in order by industry would help with that, right?

Exactly! The agent/clerk would either receive a list of cars from the connecting road in order from one end of the cut to the other, or he/she will have physically checked the track to get a list of the cars and their order. In this case, the switch list provided wouldn't be listed by industry or destination order, but your crew would switch the cars into the order they are needed. So if ShipIt listed your interchange or yard cars in random order, this would be correct.

A switch list given to a crew for industry work, would be listed in order of the outbound train, assuming it had been previously blocked out or may be listed randomly if the cars haven't been pre-blocked. Just remember one thing, on arrival at the industry, the customer may want cars spotted in a particular order that wouldn't be reflected on the switch list.

Using individual towns sounds interesting. Even though my layout is one town, each of the industrial parks would need to be set as a town I suspect.

Okay, now we're to the latest experiment part of this book er, posting. This is exactly what I've done during the night - I set up the program so that each industry is treated like it was a separate town and in all but two cases, treated each car spot as an individual industry in that town. The two odd ones just have one spot holding more than one car that is treated as an industry. Examples:
1. Industry with 5 car spots we'll call Smith Foods.
Town is called Smith
Industries at Smith are Spot 1, Spot 2, Spot 3, Spot 4, Spot 5 - each with a capacity of 1 car.
Now say that Spot 1 accepts only one type of product in one type of car - I'll use vegetable oil in tank cars for this example.
First we enter the Product: Veg Oil and select: T201 as the car type for that product.
Next we create a Shipper for that Product/Car combination which in my case will be from staging which is located in City/A-Yard.
Finally, we create a Consignee for that Product/Car which will be Spot 1 in Smith. And there you have it.
Of course, if other car spots can receive multiple products in multiple car types, then you must create a Product/Car Type and Shipper for each one then create multiple instances of the same Consignee, but for each product.
NOTE: Unless you have multiple shippers of this product/car type, you only need one instance of a shipper for each product/car type, but you can have numerous Consignees that might receive that product/car combination. Clear as mud?
2. Industry with 2 car spots that receive the same shipment we'll call Purina Feeds
Town is called Purina
Industry is called Mill with a capacity of 2 cars.
Enter Product: Feed and select: C101 as the car type for the product.
Create Shipper for that product/car type then Consignee which is Mill in Purina
Pretty simple in this case.

The final and most important part of this setup is to create a schedule for your train that reflects the order you want to switch the various industries. I set up my schedule for the train to depart CITY/A-YARD at 7:30AM then Arrive/Depart from each industry (in this case Town) in the order I want to switch them. The arrival/departure times really aren't that important other than they must be in the correct time order, i.e.; Arrive 8:00AM/Depart 8:30AM, Arrive 8:30AM Depart 9:00AM, etc. Finally add CITY/A-YARD again - showing the arrival time later than the last Departure time from the last industry and check the box Return Trip. Works like a charm!

Once I had this all set up and began generating switch list sessions - the results were pretty good. The switch lists that are generated show the work to be done at each industry separately and in the correct order. Car movements seem to vary quite well although I'm still playing with the frequency of shipments to fine tune things. Train lengths varied a fair amount too. A few times, I'd have no inbound cars at all, but several outbound or several inbound and nothing outbound. But, on average I'd have an equal number inbound and outbound. Further frequency adjustments should alter this more. There are some product/car types that I want cycled almost every session and that works out pretty well, but doesn't work 100% of the time due to my limited train length. ShipIt has a function to give some products a higher priority then others, so that may be the answer to that problem.