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I am currently developing an operating program for my Cleveland Belt Line. This fictitous line is owned an operated by the NKP & NYC serving the Cleveland Ohio area. I have not had any formal operating sessions but I have set up the necessary cards and waybills for the Carcard & Waybill System.
This thread is interesting because I have been working on a switch list program in Dedoder Pro. It is found in Panel Pro under Operations. I learned about this program when I read 2 articles by Dennis Drury in the July and October 2011 issues of the OPSig Magazine the Dispatchers Office. I have been working with it for about 2 months and while I may have some understanding of the concept I am a long way from using all of the strengths of this program. I am currently having email conversations with an individual in Houston who has been a great deal of help. However like all computer programs there are a number of different ways to do the same thing. Which means you have to tough it out on your own, and that does not even considerthe learning curve.
Is anybody out there using the program and what comments do you have
Jerry
Do you have a link to the specific page where this can be found? I went to the Decoder Pro site and can't find it.
Naturally, people have different expectations of everything they do. I've found that some computer switchlist generators seem to make things harder than they need to be -- but then, I was on the road once, and coming out of my motel in the morning, I saw the guy in the next room with the hood open on his Jaguar, pouring some kind of fluid into the engine. I would prefer not to do that with my own car when I get going in the morning, but some guys like that, and apparently that's not a bug with Jaguar fans, it's a feature.
Some switchlist generators are like that, and some guys like to have fun spending lots of time and effort to get them going, if they go at all. I'm a little skeptical of anything that takes two months to get working, but I'd like to hear more about this.
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JWB
Open Decoder Pro and go to Tools /Operations and you will see a list of 6 operations. There is a tutorial that goes with the program. The tutorial was probably written by the program developer and since he knows the answers it is not always clear or logical. There is a Yahoo group for JMRI which is a big help.
Give it a look and see if you can feel comfortable with the program
Jerry
So OK, I downloaded JMRI, and it looks like I can run the switchlist generator without having DCC. My first reaction is that it isn't as intuitive as Minirail or RailOp, but on the other hand, JMRI is free, and it has more features than other freeware programs. The whole JMRI system is also much, much more than I need just to generate switchlists -- but it's free.
Well, I can't complain. Within about an hour and a half, I was able to enter a locomotive, a car, two locations with yard tracks and spurs, a route, and a train, and I was able to run the train. The switchlist instructed the operator to pick up a locomotive in the diesel shop track, go to the yard track, pick up a boxcar, run to the other station, drop the boxcar at an industry track, and return to the first location and put the loco back in the diesel shop track.
One concern continues to be that for something I'd just use as a switchlist generator, it's a hog -- takes a long time to start on my middle-aged Windows XP system, and it's just much more program than I need. On the other hand, it isn't a fiddle-with-it-because-you-just-like-to-fiddle sort of deal, the way some other switchlist generators are. It works, and it ain't that hard to get running.
Not bad at all for a free program. There are some features that I don't think are as user-friendly as they might be, and for good use, I would need to do things like edit the AAR car types to make them into actual AAR car types (!!), but just looking at it, there are some good features that are neither in Minirail nor RailOp. For instance, RailOp makes it optional to assign a locomotive to a train, while the JMRI switchllist requires it, and it requires the loco to be in a positive location (i.e, a yard track or engine terminal/shop track). This is neater, I think.
I will try this some more, thanks very much for the tip.
My next test was to create a caboose, create a caboose track in the yard, require that the train have a caboose, and try to run the train. Ran just fine: switchlist instructed the operator to pick up the loco, pick up the caboose, pick up the cars, run the train, return cars, loco, and caboose to appropriate tracks. I've never been 100% happy with RailOp's handling of cabooses, and JMRI's is a little better here.
Next question will be seeing how the algorithm handles cars going to sidings where there's already a car to be picked up, ditto for yard tracks where cars have been removed, but new cars are ready to arrive.
Well, there's an option called "aggressive" that lets the program set out a car where there's another car waiting to be picked up, so that works fine.
You know what? The more I play with this, the more I like it. And did I mention it's free?
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Pleasedto see that are starting small and adding options. I tried to go for the brass ring and ran into problems. Went back and started all over and proceeded slowly, and was able to understand the concept behind the program.
Yes you did say it was free. There is a lot of power in the program. I have seen how others have used the program.
One new feature is the requirement that locos be added to consists, and thus that locos always have a place to go on the layout. This is making me re-think some of my operation, especially in considering where I might be able to put locos -- with car cards and many computer schemes, the locos basically don't exist or are optional, but here I have to get them from someplace on the layout and put them someplace when the train has completed its work. I hadn't added my roundhouse tracks or diesel shop tracks to RailOp or Minirail, because they weren't important to where cars went -- now I have to do it. But also, I have to think about where else a loco can be stashed. For instance, here's a loco escape track in my passenger terminal, where a pair of switchers can logically sit:
Another nice feature is that JMRI allows you to put multiple locos into a consist, so the program will always handle them together (the same way DCC does, but you don't need the DCC just to run the program). In this case, Frisco 273 and 275 have been put into a consist to work as a single heavy switcher. Over the next couple of days, I'll use them to illustrate the operation of a simple switchlist -- I really like this product!
Here's the switchlist for the move:
Note that the loco and its disposition are included in the instructions. For some reason, the font is printing out much larger than specified in the print options, and so far, I haven't been able to find what the problem is in the help documentation. But the list is still usable.
It's worth pointing out that I got to this stage of being able to run a train with about 3 hours of work -- much less than you'd need to set up car cards.
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Go to Operations Settings Tools Print options. You can change the font size and lot of other items. For instance I like to use red for setoutsand blue for pickups. You casn also add the year your RR is set in.
That's what I did -- the smallest font size available is 7 points, and that's what I set the report I printed to. Clearly it ain't 7 as printed -- what's on the screen is pretty much actual size.
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Jerry, a good JMRI switch lists is a good topic. However, I must say, that I'm intrigued by your concept for a model railroad
> Cleveland Belt Line. This fictitous line is owned an operated by the NKP & NYC serving the Cleveland Ohio area
Do you want to share anything about your model railroad (possibly in a separate post/thread)?
Forley Lithography, where the boxcar MP 80247 is to be picked up, is at the right of this photo. It's on a spur that's at right angles to the rest of the Manhattan Transfer station and yard tracks, and the spur is off Station Track 1.
However, a baggage car and a box-express are currently on Station Track 1 and will need to be moved before the Frisco switchers can do their work at Forley.
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Regarding your post about font size. I am using Courier 10 which was the default and it does not print as shown in your post.Is it possible that it may be the printer font. I use a Lexmark and can change the font in the printer settings under Page setup
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