I wanted to hear from those who have tried or use RailOp? Your likes and Dislikes? If you have tried RailOp, but chose to use something else? I know there are other programs out there, but I really want to hear how they compare to RailOp.
Thanks in Advance,
Our club uses RailOp.
I like the fact that all the trains in the schedule do not have to run.
I like that an additional train can be added on the fly.
Generally, it provides a fairly robust set options to run the railroad as you like. Many of the problems we had with earlier versions (such as loads-in-empties-out scenarios, and how to use a yard) have now been dealt with.
I don’t like that there are only car types and not specific uses for the cars. An example is if one wants a certain reefer car that says “Hormel” on the side only to go to the packing house and not to the dairy then one has to define the car type as “Reefer Meat”. That becomes a different thing than a “Reefer Dairy”. This is fine for operating the layout except then one must assign all Reefer cars to one category or another. A When just trying to do a general inventory, one can’t simply count reefer cars. I would prefer to have two separate fields a car type and a car assigned usage. And the field isn’t big enough for a good description and we have ended up with some really weird looking abbrevitions that require interpretation.
Another, and in my opinion the biggest, problem with the software is that there is no way to load a specific operating scheme. There is only one. It would be so nice if one could get a scheme set up, save it, and then do another. For example scheme #1 would include all the passenger trains, while scheme #2 has only one. The way it is now one must remember the scheme and manually put those trains in or out of the schedule each time another scheme is desired. I can think of 4-5 schemes we would like to develop and save, but the only way to do this is outside the program by manually manipulating files - what a royal pain. Even that only works un
Texas Zepher,
You seem to really know the program. Your dislikes seem to be reasonable request as enhancements/program upgrades. Have you passed these along to RailOp and gotten a response? From your writing, I now want to know what kind of Customer Service one can expect?
Thank you for the in depth answer, this is what I was looking for.
If you haven’t already, you might want to check out the message archives from the RailOp Yahoo! Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/RailOp/
The message archives are public, so you don’t have to join to see what RailOp users have said about using the program, problems, positives, support, etc.
HTH,
Steve
RailOp is a program I have not seen before, I will have to try it.
Interchange is a nice looking program that is very versatile in how you can set up when industries will be shipping and receiving commodities. For me the fatal flaw with this program is that in is written for Access 97 and will not work with newer versions of Access. Try it if you have an older machine or no Microsoft Access.
http://www.mcswiz.com/MCSMRCDS/MainPage.asp
Ship it is what I used to “test” and refine my layout design. During the 30 day free trial I entered the data for my layout and ran the ops on XtrkCad. I learned a lot from the effort and made some changes to the design because of it. Ship It is finicky and there is a “Balancer” sold by another party to make it run better. It will keep track of locomotives and rolling stock in great detail.
http://www.albionsoftware.com/html/ship_it_.html
Are there any more programs out there I should look at?
I’ve passed the one concerning the saving of different schemes. They indicated they thought saving off the files outside of the program was sufficient.
Well, they answer straight forward questions quickly. But I just happen to be writing them a note concerning another issue, one I really think they should fix (not one of my “wild wierd” enhancements), so I’ll let you know how they respond.