Model Railway
a. Layout
b. Locomotives
c. Cars
d. Operating
e. Summaries
Photos
Daley Train Log
Page 119
I am going to try describing in some detail what I am doing as I work with Ship It!.
The basic approach is a combination of two flips. The first flip is a mouse click that switches between OS X and Windows XP. The second flip is between Ship It! and Deluxe Balancer.
Ship It! does the actual work of integrating the various files and creating the appropriate reports. Deluxe Balancer does some fine tuning of what makes for an ideal sequence of car movements.
I have begun by opening Viewer (i.e. Deluxe Balancer).
- I looked at all of the rolling stock records and they seemed fine.
- I then looked at the AAR codes file and noticed one blank record. I deleted this record.
- I did not see any blank records in any of the remaining files.
I am going to pretend that this is the first time that I have used Ship It!
- Under the File menu I select Options which gives me a window with 8 tabs:
- Database: select Primary to indicate this is where all the files and reports will be saved.
- Names/Dates:
- Primary Name: 1950's Dale first try
- Primary Date: 1/01/1950
- Options 1:
- Enable Third Pass: checked
- Increment Date Each Session Generation: checked
- Distribute Cars Only in Home Division for Start Fresh: NOT checked (there is only 1 division)
- Multiplication Factor for Sending Empties Home: 10.00 (default)
- Multiplication Factor for Maximum Number of Loads: 1.00 (default)
- Allow Both Through and Local Pickups for Nonstaging: checked
- Allow Both Through and Local Pickups for Staging: checked (3 towns have staging - Jasper, Black Diamond & Coaldale)
- Send to Last Interchange When Possible: NOT checked (there are no interchanges)
- Options 2:
- Process Staging Early in Generation: checked
- Turn of Diagnostics Mode: checked
- Options 3:
- Force Usage of Existing Empties at Industry: checked
- Options 4:
- ignore
- Options 5:
- Enable Last Pass (4th Pass) Random Generation: checked
- Check Train Type of Existing Car in 4th Pass: checked
- Options 6:
- first 2 items checked but I am not looking at this at the moment
- Generate menu:
- Select Clear Empty and Load Requests
- Select Clear Demand
- Select Start Fresh (new car positions). This ran successfully with no errors.
- Diagnostics menu:
- View error messages: blank
At this point I am not sure what to do next.
Although some of the passenger cars are originally placed in two separate locations, after the second session the consist of 5 cars appears to stay together. I think this is fine. The next step will be to see if I can run Deluxe Balancer. Done.
Now to print 4 reports:
- Balancing Summary report
- NS-NC screen setting report
- product overlap report
- siding length report.
So far so good. Now to see if I can understand the information in these reports.