The Time Table is a program designed to create railroad employee timetables. The program's main display is a graph of time (of day) versus distance (along the railroad), gridded at time intervals and at station stops. Trains schedules are represented as colored lines on this graph, with diagonals representing train movement at speed and horizontal lines representing trains "siting" at stations (layovers or switching).
Creating a new time table
To create an new time table select the File->New menu item or the
toolbar button. A "Create a New Time Table" dialog, described in Section Creating a New Time Table. is displayed. This dialog box collects three pieces of information: the name of the new time table, the total time (in minutes) the time table will cover (there are 1440 minutes in a 24 hour day), and the tick interval in minutes. A new time table can also me created from the command line by including the options -totaltime and -timeincrement along with a name for the new time table.
Creating stations
Once the name and the two time elements have been selected, a set of at least two stations need to be created. This is done with the "Create All Stations Dialog", described in Section Creating the station stops for a new time table. This dialog box is used to create stations, which can have zero or more storage tracks. Storage tracks are used when a train has a long layover (and needs to be "out of the way" of other traffic) or when a train terminates and the train set is re-used for a different schedule, generally in the opposite direction. As the stations and their storage tracks are created, they are displayed in the station listing in the upper part of the dialog.
Creating cabs
After creating all of the stations, zero or more cabs can be created. Cabs are mostly for switched block DC layouts, but creating "cabs" for a DCC layout is useful, since it allows for a way to visually group trains operationally. Think of the cabs as a way of defining "crews" (operators). This allows for things like crew (operator) changes as the train moves to different parts of the layout for example.
Creating trains
Once the stations and cabs have been created, the program displays an empty chart. The chart's x axis is time (in minutes). The upper section of the chart has the cabs (if any), the middle part of the chart has the stations, and the bottom part of the chart has the storage tracks (if any). Now we can create a train. This is done by selecting either the Trains->Add Train menu item, clicking on the add train (
) toolbar button or the Add a new train button. All of these display the "Create New Train Dialog", described in Section Create New Train Dialog. Trains have a (common) name, a number (or symbol), a class number, an average speed, a scheduled departure time, and travel between two stations. The train's number (or symbol) needs to be a unique identification of the train. The class is a whole number, with smaller numbers generally being the "higher" class.
The class is used to indicate a train's priority and is also used to group similar trains together. The speed is the (scale) speed the train will be traveling between stops. The scheduled departure time is the time the train is scheduled to leave its origin station. The origin and termination stations are the station end points the train travels between. The train will get a "stop" at every intermediate station between these two stations. Note that the train won't be expected to actually stop at any station where the layover time is set to zero. Such stops would just be timekeeping points.
Once the train's basic information is set, the Schedule button can be clicked. This shifts to the schedule page, where layovers and cab assignments cab be set. The Update buttons propagate the cab settings and adjust the times to allow for the layovers. If the train makes use of station storage tracks, the Storage button can be clicked and storage tracks selected. When the train is fully configured, the Done button can be clicked to actually create the train.
Printing a time table
Once all of the trains have been added, it it possible to "print" a timetable. The LaTeX system is used to format the time table and the TimeTable program generates a LaTeX source file (.tex) and will run the LaTeX program, pdflatex, to create a PDF file from the LaTeX source file. This process is started with the File->Print... menu item or the
toolbar button. This pops up the "Print Dialog", described in Section Print Timetable Dialog. This dialog collects the name of the LaTeX source file, and the path to the LaTeX processing programing, as well as a few other options. It also has a button to configure how the timetable will be formatted.
The Configure button pops up the "Print Configuration Dialog", described in Section Print Configuration Dialog, which has three sections, a General section which gets some general configuration settings, a Multi section for various configuration settings relating to printing multiple tables, and a Groups section, for configuring groups of trains. Some of the configuration assumes some knowledge of LaTeX. A visit to the TeX and LaTeX web pages (http://www.tug.org) is a good place to start, with the beginner's page at http://www.tug.org/begin.html as the obvious starting point. You don't really have to learn how to use LaTeX, you just need to have a TeX/LaTeX system installed. The only other issue is the TimeTable.sty file. This file either needs to be installed somewhere in the TeX/LaTeX search path or it needs to be in the same directory as the LaTeX source file generated by the TimeTable program. You will need to learn a little about LaTeX if you want to include various sorts of customizations.
