After a brief thread in rec.models.railroad about Freight Car Forwarding and a couple of E-Mail conversations I've had, it has occurred to me that there are some things "missing" from the Freight Car Forwarder. I've created this page as a place to talk about these things. Feel free to add your comments!

One of the problems several new users to the Freight Car Forwarder (FCF) have had is the creation of the base data set, the collection of files that describe the model railroad and the fleet of freight cars in service. The Freight Car Forwarder only modifies the cars file, and although it does have a simple form for adding and editing cars, this is not really useful for the bulk addition of cars that needs to be done initially.

Normally, the data files used by the FCF would be created by hand using a text editor. But this is tricky, in that it is all too possible to lose count of commas and/or misremember car type or division symbols and so on. The idea of an application to aid in the creation of the data files used by the FCF has been presented. Such a program would be mostly straight forward, but there are a few questions that need to be addressed.

One of the data files is the car type file (cartypes.dat). Typically, this file maps one of 91 printable characters to a type of freight car. This file contains no layout-specific information (such as specific actual cars). Right now the two sample data sets (the original Chesapeake System and the LJ&BS) use the same Car Types File, since both data sets are for railroads that model North American railroading from the mid 20th century to the present. This car types file would probably work just fine for any model railroad set in North America from the early to mid 20th century to the present. This car types file would probably not work well for modelers whose railroads are based on European (or other parts of the world) prototype or are based in other eras.

Now, you are probably wondering why I am babbling about this. The reason is simple: if I were to create a program to create the collection of files needed by the FCF, I'd like to minimize the amount of user data entry. For modelers who are modeling North American prototypes from the mid 20th century to the present, the "stock" car types file can be use as-is. But this presents a problem for those modelers who are modeling either a different era or railroads in a different part of the world. The contents of this file is pretty standardized, for any given prototype, so it makes sense to have a set of car types files, one for each broad prototype class. The user would just select which car types file make sense for his or her model.

There are three other files that are similar, the weight class, clearance plate, and hazard files. None of these files are actually loaded into the system (at present). Only the indexes are used The set of files I have are again based on North American prototypes from the mid 20th century to the present.

Now available for Alpha Testing: a FCF Data set creation program, FCFCreate.

One other thing that came up was the use of alternative terminology. North American railroads have "Freight Cars", but European railroads have "Goods Wagons". At least one correspondent wanted to change things to use the European terminology rather then the North American terminology. This would be fairly easy to handle, as would handling metric measurements (meters vs. feet and metric tons vs. English tons), in a way similar to the way most modern computer operating systems handle different languages and so on -- this is all a matter of replacing hard-coded labels and messages with labels and messages stored in files and selected based on some configuration setting (a modeling locale if you will).

When you unzip ChesapeakeSystem.zip and LHandBS.zip on a Linux/UNIX system unzip them with the -a (auto-convert any text files). The CRLF EOLs are confusing things.

I have downloaded the linux version of FCFV2. I have also downloaded and extracted the ChesapeakeSystem.zip and LHandBS.zip files. I get the following error when trying to open the system.dat file for either of these examples. Thanks for any help you can provide. _48bf7508_p_System {Integer syntax error (DIVISIONS), in /home/cgoff/TrainSoftware/usr/local/LHandBS/system.dat!} _48bf7508_p_System {Integer syntax error (DIVISIONS), in /home/cgoff/TrainSoftware/usr/local/LHandBS/system.dat!} while executing "System TheSystem [file nativename "$fileName"] [MakeSeed]" (procedure "LoadSystem" line 10) invoked from within "LoadSystem" ("uplevel" body line 1) invoked from within "uplevel \#0 $cmd" (procedure "Button::_release" line 19) invoked from within "Button::_release .main.topf.tb0.open" (command bound to event)

Yes, included in the package are several manuals, all in PDF format. There is an (somewhat complete) User Manual, a (mostly complete) set of internals manuals, and a (work in progress) Programming Guide. There is also internal help pages for the major programs.

Is there a printable/downloadable manual available for MRRS? Looks like it'll do everything that ProTrak will do and more! I'm very excited about stumbling across your software! Thanks for making it open source AND FREE! Jim Duncan www.gulfmobileandohiorr.com