Hello all,

There has been interest of late in advancing development work on ProTrak. Based on conversations with others, I'm not certain the actual purpose of ProTrak is as well known as it might be.

Mike Moir, Jim's brother has offered this overview of ProTrak.  Mike wrote:

Brother Jim’s motivation for Protrak was found in his interest in physical models. Just as he had modeled the action of water waves physically in his civil engineering life, he wanted to produce a model railroad that acted like the real thing. To do this he needed to include accurate model weights and properly scaled locomotive requirements for the loads and grades of the railroad. This led to modeling real operations and producing a model environment that modeled real freight forwarding and prototypical car movement and even down to modeling the economics of the operation. Hence Protrak.

A week before Jim's passing, and with the involvement of Jim's brother, , we were experimenting with throttles with feedback to them. An example of this feedback would be a vibration felt within the throttle when couplers came in contact with each other. There were lots of other feedback ideas floating around too.

I am hopeful there is a much better understanding of what ProTrak is - the real design objective, and how hard it is to find the right way to move the current software forward to enable the accurate modeling of a railroad .... right down to the profitability.

Kind regards
JS