I am a happy ShipIt! user...

...since about 1997. I find it to be excellent for my needs (modern shortline) but there is a bit of a learning curve. It feels quite "business like" in that all car movement is driven by demand of products by consignees and calls for empties by shippers. It is very flexible, but you have to learn some workarounds to really tune the traffic flow the way you want it. I would be happy to go over what I've learned so far with you, either on list if there's general interest, or via pm if no-one else cares!       

Cheers,

Pete

Ship It Software

Thanks for that Pete. I think i will download the sampler and try it. I intend to use it on my Australian layout based on the 60's so probably need to tweek it a bit.

Best Wishes

Brian Deasy

Have Railbase Pro..Am Also Interested in ShipIt

Pete:  As I have all my rolling stock entered into Railbase Pro, I would be interested in your experience with Ship It.

Thanks!

Chuck

ShipIt! experiences

OK sounds good. I also use Railbase and find they complement each other well.

I'll set out a few of my main learnings and you can tell me if it's any use to you.

But first I should mention two key people in the ShipIt! world. Bill Appell, the developer of ShipIt! has been great at developing the software up to version 8.x over almost 20 years. He listens to user feedback and keeps improving the total package. You can learn about how it works and how to set it up here:

http://www.albionsoftware.com/html/ship_it__manual.html

I have also benefitted greatly from the work of the ultimate ShipIt! super-user, Dr. Jean Piquette. He developed some add-ons that make the program work even better and now works closely with Bill I think. I would advise checking out Jean's site as there is a goldmine of hard-won tips and tricks there.

https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/shipit/info  but I can't seem to access his site right now. 

I should mention I have no affiliation with either, just a happy customer.

Here is my take on the overall approach:

I started by entering towns and industries. You may put the towns into different divisions if needed. Then you figure out what products each industry on your layout would ship and receive based on real world requirements. Then you need to make a complementary shipper or consignee for each product type so that demand is generated between them, leading to traffic flow. These may be on layout or in staging. There's a report you can check to make sure you don't have any "orphan" shippers or consignees

Next up I assigned each product to an AAR car type in which it will be shipped. Again based on real-world e.g. LO for a covered hopper. You can add extra letters to the AAR codes to prevent grain going into a pellet hopper e.g LOG for grain and LOP for pellets.

With that done, I then decide how many cars of each product would be ordered by each consignee and therefore how many empties would need to be ordered by the corresponding shipper. There's a need to balance these two numbers to get consistent traffic flow over time.

The amount of cars at any location is capped by the number of spots you designate each industry, siding, yard, interchange etc. as having when you set it up.

Once I have my shippers and receivers paired up and empty/load requests balanced, I set up trains to visit all the towns and get the cars moving. Maybe just one train to practice with but eventually you can have trains coming from staging to interchanges, local switch jobs, turns, manifests or whatever you want. You can force trains to drop and collect cars at interchanges and have local trains do switching or whatever setup you want.   

There's a concept of "sessions" in ShipIt! which are really 24 hour days. You schedule trains to run during each day. Then you generate a session for today and you get switch lists (or car cards with an add-on) for all the trains plus other good stuff such as yard arrival and departure lists etc. to help your crews do their work. 

You don't have to do anything to the layout at the end of each session assuming your crews did an accurate job!    ShipIt! knows where all the cars ended up. It will empty loads and vice versa and the cars will keep on moving when you generate each session. You can change the loading and unloading dwell times so that it's not just "swap out all the cars at each spot every session" but you get some variety.

I find it neat to see what the program does with my cars each session. It's always realistic because each AAR type only gets the designated loads from the proper shippers and goes to the right consignee, but it's fun to see the ebb, flow and rhythm develop over sessions. I like that I don't already know exactly what's going to happen when I generate the next session because I didn't have to be the "car card fairy" overnight.     

There's a ton of refinement you can add once you get the basics figured out. Dwell time, interchanges, automated staging loads to empties, off-spot storage yards for too many loads etc. etc. but I found it pays to start out simple.     

Is this any help?

Cheers,

Pete 

You should also look at JMRI Ops

I'd suggest you also look at JMRI Ops. It is pretty comprehensive and also very flexible. There is a lot of help available online at the JMRI Yahoo group. It gets updated and improved regularly. It is also free. I'd at least check it out. 

Randy 

Thanks, Pete

Pete:

Thanks for the info.  Yes, it is helpful.  I'm looking at the ShipIt manual and learning a lot.  Looks like a useful program.

Thanks again,

Chuck

A couple more observations about ShipIt!

Chuck - glad to help!  A couple more observations from my setup:

One thing which I haven't been able to get ShipIt! to do is match the standing order of a cut of cars on the layout to the switchlist exactly. I can block it "from" or "to" by town, but sometimes not by specific industry spots. So sometimes there will be a cut of 6 LOGs for the elevator with an XMH for the auto parts mfr in the middle. I keep the cuts blocked in the train correctly for ease of spotting at the destinations and just take extra care marking off the cars on the switchlist.

The other thing is the time needed to generate sessions on the computer. The software commits each change in real time to disk which is good in case of a blue screen, but makes it disk intensive. Recently I added a solid state drive and now I can run 100 test sessions ("days") in 15 minutes to see how my traffic flow is holding up over time. 

For context, I model a moderns shortine (O scale). I have about 120 cars, 3 on layout towns, 2 staging towns and about 50 industries on and off layout. About 20 product types in 20 AAR car types. For trains, I run 2 turns out of staging to the interchange, one first thing in the morning and the other late night. There are 2 on-layout turns to the local towns and back plus one captive industrial park switching the park to a local interchange siding. Some cars move daily, some up tp 72 hours dwell time. I can switch each train consecutively by myself, or keep up to 3 2-man crews busy for about 3 hours per session (one "day" in ShipIt!).  I never have to handle cars between sessions. I can add or remove industries, products, cars, trains etc. to the program and it tells me what to do on the layout. Next session any changes are incorporated and built in to the operations from that point on.    

I did take a look at JMRI and I think it has great potential. For sure I would try both if I was starting now. These programs take some learning and sometimes it's the "workarounds" you can figure out to get you the exact operation feature you're looking for. 

To summarize, despite a few shortcomings, I like ShipIt! because it feels like setting up a business that's entirely based on supply and demand of products first, then you create a railroad operation to meet your customers' supply and demand needs. I like that I don't know exactly what will happen to each car per session except that it will be as realistic as the parameters I setup.  

Best of luck with whatever you choose - it will be fun!

Pete 

Ship It Car Cards/Waybills

We use ShipIt to print the car cards and waybills for our club layout.

One significant limitation of the system is that it insists on having one waybill per car.

On the other hand, it allows you to have a primary and secondary database, so all our cars are in the primary, and the secondary is used to create all of the waybills, having to create 'dummy' cars for each type to attach the waybills too. Bit of a kludge, but it allowed us to print the waybills we needed for the various pools.

Nothing wrong with a good kludge!

I think that's similar to what I meant about workarounds. Once you have the "by the book" way to do things figured out, there's a ton of neat stuff you can do using program features in ways other than described in the manual.

By the way Chris, I didn't know you guys used ShipIt! at the club. I'm in Waterloo, OK if I come by the club one evening? Would love to see your layout in action under ShipIt!

Cheers,

Pete    

I bought V5 years ago...

... and after spending fifty or sixty hours trying to make it work on a very simplistic layout, set it aside and have never touched it again. I consider it the worst hobby money I've ever spent. Ever.

I was building a large, complex layout. I wanted ops software that actually worked. Shipit! didn't. I'm sure I could have gotten it to work, but I was not interested in becoming a database programmer, and it would have taken hundreds of hours to do so.

 At the time I purchased Shipit! in 2002, Jean Piquette's answers to questions on the Yahoo group was essentially the only product support available. There was none from the vendor. I don't know if that's still the case, but Jean still answers most of the questions on Yahoo, and based on what he says, some of Shipit!'s features still don't work very well.

I don't know how much the program has improved since I bought it, but I can safely say it couldn't have gotten worse. So be careful!

Sorry to hear about your experience Mark

Would you mind saying which software you ended up using? I'm interested to hear what the owners of large complex layouts use. Particularly if you have trains which are "turns" from staging and back, how loaded and empty state is changed. Also do you have the ability to list cars on switchlists as they are in standing order on the track? That's one thing I miss in ShipIt! even though V8 is a lot better than V5 from 12 years ago to be fair.

Thank you.

Pete 

Just as an FYI

Awhile back I was looking for  some type of car routing program and one that looked pretty good to me on the surface was made by a company called Shenandoah software or Shenware.  The programs were called Mitrains  and Waybills and worked in concert with each other. I never got around to buying and using them as plans changed and that was about four layouts and a scale change ago but I was interested in them at the time. Maybe worth a look?

Michael

Just One Datapoint

Hi Pete,

I looked into several different software packages, including ProTrak, MRCDS, Railop and, of course, Shipit!. There are others out there I haven't looked at. I moved several years ago, so I dismantled the layout before I got to the point of operating. I never settled on any package. But each package I looked at seems to have its pros and cons. I've almost (but not quite!) reached the conclusion that car cards and waybills are the best way to go for me. If I ever get a layout near an operation-ready state again (just had to move again, so the latest layout is coming down), I'll take another look.

Keep in mind that my experience with Shipit! is just one datapoint. I know some folks who used it successfully, and the testimony of others in this thread shows that it can work (but everyone I know personally that did use it moved on to other software - not really sure what that might indicate).

Good luck with whichever package you pick!

Club Layout

Hi Pete, 

We have regular work nights every Wednesday, with someone usually there after about 7:30. This week the guys will be staging the layout for our operating session this Saturday. We usually have these once per month from the fall through spring. If you want to actually see the system in action, this is the best way; you're welcome to come and visit for the session. It starts at 4 PM and will run for the duration of the evening.

I couldn't find a way to send a PM, so email me at cv_acr at yahoo.com if you need more info.