Well, I can't answer questions, but we use it at my local club. And everyone but the guy who put it on HATES the thing. Part of the problem is that by bieng a club, there is a lot of opportunity for people to come and freerun. That's no problem, except Ship It can;t track freeplay'd cars. But wev've also had software issues, routing issues, in general, it hasn't been worht it.
I have been running it on my home layout for 10-years. It's a b-tch to set up, but once set, it's a dream. One thing I learned, it's easier if you lie to it. It is very prone to cascade failure, so I tell it all sidings have a 20-car capacity, while yards are 200 to 500 capacity. As for your Club, if somebody wants to run their own cars, just have them swap car for car, then after the session, replace the original cars in place of the visiting cars.
Ah, but with a few excptions, they run the club cars. And most of the time, it's intense enough running, ie, full on switching, that things get shuffled to the point of being uuntrackable. (Yeah yeah, waybils... grumble... snort...)
Ok, define "shuffled". Are they switching the wrong cars, or spotting tham at the wrong industries? What I would do is print out the next run session, and go through all the "Pick-Up" moves, and simply place the correct cars in the right spots to be picked-up. All the set-out moves are new. Since I have re-programmed the software to change the sessions, I noticed something strange. To make the initial set up go smoother and faster, I learned (the hard way) to duplicate all the basic information in both the "Primary" and "Secondary" sides of the program. Then in Secondary, I input only one Shipper and one Consignee, plus the product and AAR type cars, just putting in cars 1,2,3,4,5 Etc. Then I can run 20 or so sessions very quickly and track how the cars are moving. If there are problems, I can make tweaks quickly, and run more test sessions. When everything is moving correctly, I duplicate the information into the Primary side, adding more and more correct industries until completed. Now I noticed that although I place enough boxcars for each indusrty, it's trying to use the same dozen or so for all moves. I have tried to remidy this by making separate AAR types for each industry, XM-1, XM-2, and so on, and that helps. The other thing I noticed is the program is running into siding capacity errors, because it places cars on siding where they have no business being. A flat car gets placed at an industry that only uses boxcars, and so on. I am wondering if there is a setting in the Options that is causing this?
No.nothigns "wrong" inheirently, though it has crashed on us several times and is currently being ignored for the old papr and pencil routine, I don't know why though specifically, but when the officsal ops session ends, the cars all end in a certain spot. Over that week or three, we have usually an "open run night" and a worknight each week that neccesitates test trains, plus five other days when membersd can come in and show their friends the layout; play trains. Cars end up in spots that are not where Ship-it thinks they are. Now, if it was a simple move of the entire train, then it's easily undone. But if 12 cars end up in 10 different locations, (shuffled like a deck of cards, unpredicatble by most average peeps) then it becomes extremely difficult to find them all and get them rest for the next ops session. Now were it me, I still like the idea we had about operating by car type not car number. it makes it easier on the setup crew and yardmasters can play "go fish with what they have.
I still think car cards and waybills are the way to go since they tend to be self correcting. However, I'm not running 500 pieces of rolling stock.
