I started operating my Wheeling Freight Terminal about a year ago and have now settled into monthly sessions. The layout represents an area under yard limits so operations tools are a little different. I posted details on handling outbound cars at my blog.

So I was thinking, what if you mounted a camera in a loco to get an engineer's-eye view, set up a monitor in a room separate from the layout area, and had an operator sitting at that monitor with a wireless throttle? The conductor would be by the train in the layout room. They would communicate via radio/cell/etc. The conductor would radio all the commands to the engineer.

Those of you doing Operations, how do you switch your yards? I was playing today at the club because after 6 hours of making sure the Ops session was ready the turnout was a SPECTACULAR failure. With my switchlists already done though, I lashed an engine to the first two tracks of cars and began shuffling cars into four trains. It's the prototype way, and honestly makes more sense than doing it one train at a time, but the little voice in my head was saying "Gee, Dispatcher needs a train ready to get a crew busy, and you have all of yours...

A few weeks ago I found a post somewhere of an OPS program that had really good screens. The commentary was that you inventoried your cars and your industries and specified each industries inbound and outbound cars and their frequency. Then you do a few tweaks and overrides before generating a train list as to what went where and what got picked  up and where each of those cars went.It wasn't JMRI based or simply Access/Excel. It actually had screens to input data.  I vaguely remember thinking that I could order it over the net.