Michael,

Just wanted to check in with you and let you know I have not forgotten your inquiry.  I've been working one on one on your inquiry with a long term ProTrak friend of mine with whom the two of us did a large amount of editing on the PTBM. I reviewed your inquiry when I got home Sunday night and have a question for you that will help us formulated some assistance for you.

1.  Do you have cars and trains running under ProTrak on your layout and something isn't going quite as you had expected ?

or

2.  Do you need assistance  in expressing you short line rr in ProTrak ?

Joe Brann

Orlando, FL

Micheal,

It have been communicating with Joe about your layout. Without specifics of your track plan, operations plan and how the car float/ferry ties in with the rest of the world it is hard to be certain of the best way to setup ProTrak. While my layout does not use a carfloat or active staging, I do make use of virtual trains, yards and customers (these are described below).

If you would like to discuss your layout and how I would suggest trying to operate it using ProTrak, please contact me by email. I have sent you my email address via the forum private message which you should find by checking your PM inbox by clicking the "Inbox" button on the "Signed in as" area of the forums page when you are logged in.

If you can send your best ProTrak files for your RR and your track and operations plank, I will take a look at it and see where it can be optimized. Allowing Joe to take a look could provide another useful opinion.

Here are some thoughts based on what I understand your situation is.
I am assuming that cars would need to be loaded and unloaded when they are off your physical layout. Cars need to be loaded and unloaded to allow ProTrak to properly route them. There are only three ways to accomplish this in ProTrak:

1. The usual and easiest is to send the cars to a staging track(s) and then assign waybills for "offline" industries to load/unload them. Offline refers to the rest of the rail network that you do not actually model. Since your physical layout does not have any staging tracks it would require using "virtual" staging track(s).    Virtual staging, stations, yards and trains refer to locations and trains that exist in ProTrak but have no corresponding existence on the physical layout except for off layout storage drawers. Running a virtual train to a virtual destination allows ProTrak to tell you where a particular car/loco should be stored when off the physical layout.

2. The other "normal" way to get cars loaded/unloaded would be to setup individual virtual customers for each of your waybills so that ProTrak treats all waybills as if they were online shipper to online consignee. This would be very complicated and involve a lot of virtual movements.

3. The final approach would require manually assigning and de-assigning waybills to individual cars. This would be very time consuming and would quite probably result in car routing issues/errors. I would avoid this approach.

Your need to have most of your cars off the layout is untypical, but ProTrak has routines to handle cars being off layout but still "tracked by ProTrak". this is called "active staging" and would be used as designd in option 1 above. When active staging is turned on (in Administration->Active Staging Options) you tell ProTrak ha maximum number of cars to de-activate and the median number of sessions cars should remain off layout. I would expect that you would want most of your cars going to staging to be deactivated and have a median off layout 'time' of 4 or more sessions.

For option 2 you would need to set load/unload times at the virtual customers to allow the car to remain stationary for the ammount of time needed.

If you "deactivate" cars in your system ProTrak looses track of them and when reactivated would place them back at your default yard.

Best,

John Valle