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11:02 am
April 26, 2015
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On my SVL layout some of the SPOTs in Front Street Industrial Area are serviced by an AM turn FST 1/2 and the remaining SPOTs are serviced by a PM turn FST 3/4. My main on-layout yard RVS-Yd is unfortunately poorly designed such at I do not classify cars when a train arrives at RVS-Yd but rather cheery pick cars from whatever track the incoming train could find room for when preparing an outgoing train for departure. I get bashed about this by my close friend Bruce whenever he is over for an OP session like yesterday afternoon. Bruce is my design mentor !! So one of the things that came up during the bashing session was whether ProTrak would allow me to service ALL the Front Street SPOTs with FST 1/2 and then all the SPOTs in Front Street with FST 3/4.
So my question is - Will the "Other Switching Train" window on the Changing Customer X screen allow me to do this? Is anybody using this ProTrak feature?
thanks to all. Miss seeing you all.
Joe
9:54 am
April 26, 2015
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Hi Joe
I tried the two different trains serving one spot and went away from it. It's been to long ago and I have forgotten why. When I have cars ready to be spotted after the original train has run, I create an extra for that train Number and run it again. Another option is to make the train switching those spots an open train that doesn't close rather than as a turn, then you can run it as many times as you want. I hope this helps. What goofy weather we are having. We had spring in January and now it is snowing this morning.
Fred K
8:09 am
April 26, 2015
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Thanks Fred for your reply. You said that it had been a "long time Ago" when you tried and then dropped using the "other switching train" capability in ProTrak. Now that some of us are dropping back to earlier versions of ProTrak (I'm presently using 352) do you by any chance recall what version of ProTrak you were using when you tried and apparently failed to get "other switching train" feature to work as you had expected? I'm taking a copy of my present ProTrak folder back to my layout room laptop and plan on doing some testing to see if w/Ver. 352 I might have success. Otherwise the idea of calling an Extra is interesting and one I might do to.
You guys up in the NW sure seem to have had a plethora of really stormy weather this winter. Hope that strange weather doesn't affect the seed crop this year.
Joe
7:02 pm
April 26, 2015
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Well Joe, it was several years ago so I can't really be of much help as to what version it might have been.
Fred
12:30 am
May 8, 2015
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Hi Joe and Fred,
I’ve had some experience in this area and have used a variety of solutions.
1. Use Fred’s solution with the repeating train. I chose to make the industries part of WIN-YD, rather than their former independent switching district to make this easy. Visually the industries are very close to the yard and the operators were not aware that they were 30 miles away on the prototype.
2. In another case, a town between two yards was again very close to one of the yards. The operators were entering the destination yard without doing any of the switching, as they didn’t recognize there was a town there. It was in fact just 3 small industries, and no town buildings to make it recognizable as an independent entity. You have to remember that my layout is pretty large with over 75 trains, spread out over 6 months of op sessions, so their chances of running the same train again in 3 years is pretty small. In the meantime, I expanded the yard, integrated these industries into the yard complex and used a repeating train.
3. In another case, I had a pair of opposing locals between the major yard and a minor yard, both of which serviced the same industries in town C. Train 1 was supposed to take the empties from the main yard to town C before terminating in the minor yard, while the opposing train 2 brought the loaded cars back to the main yard. What was happening was that train 1 was taking the loads to the secondary yard in order to connect up with train 2. This was a timing issue, so I simply ran train 2 first and everything worked out like I wanted it to. So the feature in PT works properly.
4. I often run an extra when required ie a second train X. This would work in your situation without integrating the industries into a yard as I did above, which takes a fair bit of work to change all the names, then the train schedules and all the waybills.
john
PS I noted that you are running version 352. I thought you were having difficulties, as I am, with the cross-naming of some trains in operations. Have you found a work-around?
8:15 am
April 26, 2015
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John,
Thanks for your detailed reply. I think it was Bob B and/or Jim B (the B brothers) who saw issues with train names. I just finished an OP session using Ver. 352 and to the best of my awareness I didn't see any name problem. It should be noted that for my small layout I print all my paperwork before the OP Session starts. Don't know if that would have any affect or not.
Joe
7:58 pm
April 26, 2015
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Fred-------One last inquiry on "other switching train". Do you recall if there is a control / option bit that needs to be enabled to allow for use of "other switching train"?
Anybody----- I just brought up a customer for whom earlier today I had set up an "other switching train" and the background of that field is blue. Does anybody remember what Jim used blue backgrounds to denote?
thank
Joe
10:07 am
April 26, 2015
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Good morning Joe - I don't remember there being anything special about blue backgrounds or having to enable anything for switching a customer with two different trains. It has been a while ago, but the problem I had with two trains serving one customer was some funky car routing. I have one train originating at the end of a branch, going to the main line interchange and returning. There is one intermediate town (X) to switch on the branch. If I had a car off spot at X because there was no space on the siding, when space became available, the outbound train would pick it up, take it to the interchange and then bring it right back on the returning train and spot it correctly. I was running these two trains as an A/B turn. When I made this job two different trains ( A outbound, B returning) then the customer was switched as expected (the off spot car was spotted by the outbound train A). Jim may have fixed this. There was a time when turns were doing odd things.
Fred
7:37 pm
April 26, 2015
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I've sorta come to the end of my work on getting all my Front Street customers to be serviced by 2 trains a day so I thought in lieu of any updates to the wonderful PTBM that I would expound (who me??) on what I found for the record and those who will follow us.
As I reported earlier when I entered a switching train in the "other switching train" window on the customer screen the backgroud turned blue. Clearly this means something but I have searched thru the Q&A Appendix L of the PTBM and found no reference to what a blue backgound means. SO as best I can determine, w/o additional information, the "other switching train" feature of ProTrak using Ver. 348 and 352 has not been fully flushed out.
BUT all is not lost wrt my original goal of having all my Front Street customers be served by two trains daily. Andy and then Bob B suggested that I look using Transportation / Call a Job extra. And this worked very well. When my FST-1/2 AM turn finished being classified I clicked on Transportation / Call a Job extra and clicked on FST-2 / Call extra / Yes and sure enuf I got XFST-1 in my train list. I ran XFST-1 after two trains later in the day arrived in my main yard RVS-Yd from staging and sure enuf arriving cars from these two trains destined for Front Street customers were assigned to XFST-1 which I ran as a PM turn. SO my goal of having all my Front Street customers served by two trains daily was accomplished. But what I noticed w/Ver. 348 for sure is that the return train of the XFST-1 outgoing train did not pick up any cars from Front Street customers. w/Ver 348 it always came back empty. w/Ver 352 I think there were an ocassional pick-up made by the returning train from XFST-1.
Hope this helps for the long term record.
Joe
11:12 am
April 26, 2015
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Hi Joe
I've been using 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) switching trains through most of the upgrades and I'm now using #351. I think that the blue is just a highlight to indicate that there is a second switching train. When you click on it, it takes you to the panel that allows you to enter or change switching trains. If you have more than one additional switching train, then the selected one is highlighted in blue.
Something to watch with additional switching trains is that there is enough time for the cars to be unloaded and that the route of the additional train is able to service the empties.
As Fred mentioned, turns have done some weird things. I've always had trouble with turns which crossed sub-division boundaries. I think I have resolved that problem by having the turn go into logical staging at the junction and then use a different train number for the turn which is entirely within one subdivision. It then drops all its cars at the end of the run and they get picked up by the train in logical staging and returned to the other sub-division. Not very eloquent but it seems to work.
All the best
Peter
4:14 pm
April 26, 2015
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Peter good to hear from you it's been a while. Hope all is well.
I eventually got "Other Switching Train" working in a paper study I did a while ago. I didn't get any significantly useful results, but I think you may have hit upon something that I didn't pay enuf attention to namely "unloading time". I think between my morning FS-1/2 turn which I made serve all of my Front Street customers and a late afternoon "Other switching train" FS-3/4 there clearly wasn't enuf unloading time and also there were probably not enuf new cars that came up from staging to my main yard to go to Front Street on the FS-3/4 turn. i.e. the two turns ran to close to each other. Anyway I've sorta dropped that effort for now.
How about those fantastic counts Mike posted of new users who have downloaded the ProTrak new user files !
Joe
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