Model Railroad System
2.2.2
Overall User Manaual
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The Freight Car Forwarder is a program designed to simulate freight car traffic on your model railroad. It does this by matching types of freight cars with industries. Specific types of freight cars are meant to carry specific types of commodities and specific industries produce or consume specific types of commodities.
Before you start using the Freight Car Forwarder system, you should carefully study Section Data files and Section Data File Formats of the reference section. These files describe the system layout (system file), the industries (industry file), the trains that will move the cars (trains file), and the cars themselves (the cars file). There are some additional files, including an owner's file and a car types file, as well as a file for statistics. All of these files are plain text files–you will need a plain text file editor (such as Notepad under MS-Windows or gedit under many versions of Linux ) to create and generally edit these files. The only files that are ever modified by the Freight Car Forwarder system are the cars and the statistics files. You should not edit the statistics file–this file is automatically generated by the Freight Car Forwarder system. While it is possible to use tools available as part of the Freight Car Forwarder system to edit cars in the cars file, it is probably best to use a regular text editor to add, modify, or delete cars in a wholesale manor. All of the other files are treated as "constant data" by the Freight Car Forwarder system, which will load the data into memory and not modify that data.
The Freight Car Forwarder starts loading data by opening and reading the system file, using either the file menu's Open
... item or open file button on the toolbar. This file contains the path names of the other files, which are assumed to be relative to the directory (folder) that contains the system file. All of the system data is loaded into a large data structure, which is then used by the program to simulate car movements.
In order to move cars, the cars need to be assigned, that is, they need to have a destination set, either to be loaded (if empty) or unloaded (if loaded). The Car Assignment procedure performs this task.
Once cars has been assigned, they need to be moved. Cars are moved on trains, and this is done with the run trains procedures. There are three of these procedures: Run All Trains in Operating Session, Run Boxmoves, and Run One Train at a time. The run trains procedures simulate the actual movement of cars and determines which trains will move which cars and in what order. From this simulation, a set of yard and switch lists can be generated and printed out for use during your operating session.
Once the trains have been run, yard and switch lists can be printed out, using the print yard lists menu.
Once you have assigned cars, simulated train movements and created your Yard and Switch Lists, you should save the cars file. You should now be ready to run your trains in an operating session. If your session went off well, you will be ready to make car assignments for your next session. If there were problems during the operating session (such as bad ordered cars or late trains), you might have to make adjustments before running the car assignment process for the next session. You would use the car editor to make these adjustments.
Various reports can also be generated and printed using the reports menu.
Other activities include adding, removing, and editing cars and displaying various state information, such as assigned and unassigned cars, car movement information, lists of trains, and lists of industries, stations, and divisions.