Clark & Tom:

Great examples! I was also interested in train schedules and timetables. Do either of these programs allow one to set up trains and schedules or graphs? I’m more of a visual person so these type of examples are great to see although much more complicated than my little short line. 

STS is a car forwarding software system so it doesn't get involved with timetables, schedules, etc... I've had the best luck just using a spreadsheet program for that. I know that there are software packages out there that will do what you are looking for, but my railroad is also rather small (single track, six stations, nine jobs max) so the spreadsheet is more than  adequate. Here's a link to the NMRA's software page: www.nmra.org/software

I created my own timetable planning spreadsheet.  It has 3 parts.

The design part has an upper and lower grid.  The lower grid is where I enter times and make adjustments.  The upper grid calculates the times and displays them.

​In the lower grid I have running times between stations (grey rows) and dwell times at stations (white rows).  I enter the durations in minutes and a start time and the upper grid calculates the clock times.  The left side (south) reads and calculates down, the right side (north) reads and calculates up.

Here is some detail on the formulas I use to generate the times.  The departure time at the next station equals the departure time at the previous station, plus the running time between stations and the dwell at the next station.  Excel calculates using days so I convert the minutes to days by dividing by 1440.

You will find that at certain stations you want to schedule a large dwell (so need both an arrival and departure time) or for some reason you want to "skip" a row.  This illustrates the foumulas to do an arrival/departure entry and how to skip a row.  These are special formulas that ONLY apply to the rows affected.  The rest of the rows are the stock formulas.

I can adjust the times by increasing the dwell or the running time.  Increasing the running time makes the arrival later (and all subsequent times), increasing the dwell makes the departure later (and all subsequent times).  In most cases I just tweak the dwell.  However there are those places where the local works some lone industry between sidings and I up the running time to account for the time spent switching.

​When I finish tweaking the upper grid, I copy and paste the one side of the upper grid into the timetable blank.  I paste it as values only.  That's because not all trains have times shown at all stations.  Some trains may have an arrival and a departure shown for some stations and some trains only a departure at that station.  By just pasting values I can remove the times at selected stations without screwing up the time calculations.  Downside is any changes to times have to be manually input.  Also since MS uses days, you will have to reformat the cells to display time the way you want.

​Then add in the grid lines, and other codes and symbols or bold stations per your railroad's timetable preferences.  The timetable will probably need to be printed landscape and you will have to tweak the margins to get it to print.  Smaller fonts help.  For really big layouts, it may require printing one direction on one page and the other on another page, which is entirely prototypical.

I did string graphs but they were laughably low tech.  I used Excel to generate a time/station grid.  Then I used the "draw" option to manually draw lines that generally aligned with the timetable times.  I then just copied and pasted the lines and changed their color as required.  Very, very, very low tech.  No formulas whatsoever.

I generated two string graphs, one for trains and one for operators.  The trains one validated meets and schedules and was balanced to minimize orders.  The operators one made sure I didn't have more than two trains on the road at any time, because my operation only had two road crews.  Scheduling 3 trains at once was a guaranteed fail.  I also put in a 1:1 time and 4:1 time scale (later changed to 3:1) just to see where trains would be if I started or ended the sessions at different times.