The purpose of a railroad is to ship goods from one place to another, and that's what Ops is about.  The idea is to allow you to define what to ship, where, and how, or to let the program examine the layout and generate meaningful work orders.  There are a lot of new moving parts involved.

Loads.  If you are going to move goods, you need goods to move, and we now have plenty.  You can choose from over 600 types of freight loads, two thirds of them with side- and top-view images you can see in hoppers, flatcars, and other open cars.  Here is a glimpse of the Load Chooser:

(Click any picture for a larger image)

Industries. Tell where to move the goods by defining industries on your layout -- specific locations where you can set out or pick up specific types of goods.  We provide a catalog of standard industry types, as shown here, or you can create your own.

For more on these topics, see preliminary documentation about Loads and Industries.

Switchlists, Scheduled Trains, Car Inventory. New data structures and interactive docking grid windows provide ways to define your operations and keep track of them.  The grids allow you to set up your trains and switchlists, view your set of cars, sort on any field, group in a heirarchy, and more.  Here's how it looks so far:

Random Ops Generation.  By the time the package is ready, you will be able to open any random layout, click a button, and the program will devise a random operating scheme, taking into account what sorts of cars can go where.  Click again for a new challenge.

What Else Is New

Route Finder. Just for fun we developed a gadget which can find all possible routes between two given points on the layout.  You might be surprised what it comes up with.  For example, here are two of about fifteen ways to get from Penner's Warehouse to the mainline interchange on the L20:

Default Cars. Cartoon car images are a thing of the past!  Now you can choose from several stylish sets of default cars to make all your layouts look better instantly. 

Engine sounds. we have vastly increased the number and quality of the engine sounds and sounds in general.  We now have over 115 MB of sound files that can be added to enhance engine realism to any train.

Cadrail export. Now export your TrainPlayer layout to DXF format, suitable for import into Cadrail, Autocad, and other CAD programs.  We worked on this project with help from Tom Holtman of Cadrail.

Featured Layouts

Requirements.  Programs run under Windows NT, 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7.  An internet connection is useful but not essential -- you need one to browse and download content from the web, but you can run without it using content from your disk or DVD.  Disk space: you need only about 30MB to install the program files, but will want more than that to download content from web or DVD -- up to a around 1GB for the full premium content.

Now on DVD.  All products are available on DVD for a $10 shipping charge.  The disk includes all purchased content, so you do not need to download anything further except updates.  You are given the choice of installing to your hard drive or accessing directly from the DVD.  To request a DVD, select it in the Shipping drop-down menu on the checkout page.

License agreement.  Our license agreement is displayed during install and reproduced in the Readme file.  It says you are allowed to install the program on as many computers as you like, as long as you don't sell or give away the license key to anyone else.

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