What's good and bad about the model railroad planning software you have used, or heard of?
The bad thing about track plan drawing programs is that a lot of people dive straight into drawing track plan after track plan, instead of first spending some time on figuring out what they actually want to model, what they want to be able to do on their layout, what important scenes to include, basically coming up with an
overall conceptual design, or thinking about how to fit the major parts into the available room (i.e. the
structural design).
Some general suggestions on the design process:
The phases of track planning:
http://www.layoutvision.com/sitebuildercontent/sitebuilderfiles/ld_bc.pdf
The "Tragedy of Cad too soon" :
http://home.earthlink.net/~mrsvc/id40.html
The
good thing about track plan drawing programs is that it is easier to make changes to the track plan on screen than on paper, and thus make easier to make iterative changes and trying alternate ways of doing things.
And it forces you to stay more or less honest about things like how much space turnouts and track take - most of us are way too optimistic when drawing track plans by hand with the track shown as a single line on paper.
What would you personally recommend?
As for specific programs - it
really depends on what you want to do.
E.g. whether you are willing to spend money on software or want freeware, what operating system you run, how familiar you are with CAD (Computer Aided Design) type software, whether you will be just using the program to get a
rough idea about what could fit in your available space, whether you will be using sectional track only, whether you already have picked what manufacturer you want to buy turnouts from and so on and so forth.
If you just want to get a
quick idea about whether there is enough space in your room without having to severely compromise curve radii or creating overly steep inclines/declines, then pretty much any program will work.
You can do e.g. Atlas RTS (Right Track Software) - freeware, but limited to Atlas track (and flextrack).
Which is not bad if you actually are planning to use Atlas track, or if you just need to get a rough idea, but maybe not so great an idea if you are planning a design filled to the gills with lots of turnouts from a different manufacturer (yeah - turnouts from different manufacturers can have quite different geometries - if you are detail planning tight spots, use templates of the type of turnout you will be buying).
You could try this new program called Scarm, from some guy in Bulgaria or some such place that just popped up on the net a few months ago, and pretty much instantaneously hit a ton of different model railroading groups to advertise for his free track planning software.
Personally, I still feel just a tiny bit leery about downloading and installing a new freeware program made by an unknown person from the Balkans, for fear that I would be installing a Trojan on my system. But that's just me. It probably is just fine, and Mixy probably is just a nice, enthusiastic and quick programmer/model railroader who wants to share with other model railroaders.
Otherwise - there is a bunch to pick from. Most of them have some people who swear
by them and other people who swear
at them
Let us know a little more about your needs, and perhaps people can offer more targeted suggestions, instead of a more vague "I use product X and it has worked great for me".
Smile,
Stein