Model Railway
a. Layout
b. Locomotives
c. Cars
d. Operating
e. Summaries
Photos
Daley Train Log
Page 93
I began adding records to the Ship It! databases today.
I am beginning by indicating that I have only one division in the layout. This is highly recommended as a starting value until one becomes more familiar with the software. Done.
I am also going to begin by having zero interchanges. The Ship It Rules of Thumb has #30 "The number of interchanges in your database should be 1 less than the number of divisions." Okay. I may revisit this later when I am more familiar with the software. But if I decided to identify some track as an interchange I will also have to indicate an increase in the number of divisions. At the moment I want to try to keep things simple.
I thought I already had complete records for all 8 towns, but then I noticed that I had indicated that Jasper and Cooaldale were staging areas. This may be true in the sense that they represent areas where trains are formed but Ship It! uses the term staging in a different sense. I noticed the following sentence in the Ship It! manual on page 12-7: "Trains that enter staging towns will not drop off any cars - the same consist will leave the town that entered it." I had not noticed this before and it explains why I was having some trouble placing cars near the coal/sand tower in Jasper when I was using Ship It! almost two years ago.
Divisions, Interchanges and Towns are relatively straight forward: 1 Division, 0 Interchanges and 8 Towns.
Now for the Rolling Stock (i.e. cars). The idea is to make sure that I have a record in the Rolling Stock database for each car on my layout. I think I have about 20 cars in the database from my initial efforts two years ago.
But almost as soon as I began adding records I ran into complications as a number of the cars that I was adding involved a cascading effect where I also had to add a new record in the AAR Types database to describe a new type of car (e.g. express baggage car for a passenger train) and also a new record in the Recording Marks database (for a new road name such as Grand Trunk Western or British American Oil).
I did complete this activity for all the cars that were in Jasper, Black Diamond and Distillery Row. That still leaves Pine Ridge, Prairie Dog, Queenston, Prairie Rose and Coaldale.
There is benefit to the cascading though. Once the information has been entered into a database the software takes advantage of this by automatically asking one to simply select the appropriate record from the database instead of having to retype the information.