Ship it!


rgeiter

rgeiter

Conrail Quality
Anyone here use the Ship it! program for operations on your layout?

I bought the floppy disc version back in the 90’s at a train show in Timmonium Md.( when we still had train shows😒) Anyways, I bought version 2.0 at the time, it’s now version 9. I didn’t have much luck with it but I did find the “Railbase Professional” and “Car Cards” portions great and I used the heck out of them! When I tore down my layout in the early 2000’s I had saved the program data. Back in 2018 I decided to fire it back up. I had to buy the newest version though. It found my old files and all was well again. I was impressed.

http://www.albionsoftware.com/
 
I remember our club had it, but using it was an exercise in futility because of the way the layout was designed and laid out within the program. It would have you build a train in the yard, then take the train directly back to the yard.
 
bnsf971 said:
I remember our club had it, but using it was an exercise in futility because of the way the layout was designed and laid out within the program. It would have you build a train in the yard, then take the train directly back to the yard.
Click to expand...
Yep. Most times my version 2.0 wouldn’t even build a train. So I printed a 3x5 index card for every car via the Car Card program. So now if an industry needs 4 boxcars, I randomly select 4 cards from a pack and retrieve them from the yard. Works well for me that way. I don’t use the actual Ship it! Program anymore.
I color coded my car types so it would be easier to find them in the pack. Interestingly enough, when Icontacted the ownerback in 2018 I mentioned my color coding system to him which he responded positively too. Now that is an option with the newest Car Card version!
CF43C8EA-667C-4F4B-9AE9-6C08D229A097.jpeg
 
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I wrote a MS Access application to generate car cards and waybills (actually over a dozen variations over the last 2 or 3 decades.)

I generally use 2 move waybills.

My current versions are based on the late 1880's-early 1900's "memorandum waybills" (a prototype car card) that traveled with a train.

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Our club used ShipIt! (or at least the Car Cards version/component of the software) to print car cards and waybills, but it has some stupid assumptions baked into it that caused us to work around...

Waybills are a 1:1 match to specific cars, so we basically had to use two different databases, one for the cars and another for the waybills, making "dummy" cars for each waybill. We also had to play around with how we created "industry" and town/station names for off-layout destinations to make it seem like stuff was actually going anywhere other than just "west staging" since the program doesn't really handle that.

Waybills should never be "fixed" to a specific car if you want the system to be flexible. It's these types of assumptions that make people unfairly criticize CC&WB as being "too rigid" or "repetitive" and the ShipIt Car Cards software leans right into it...

For my own RR, I made my own cards and waybills using Excel spreadsheets, following the basic form of the ShipIt paperwork at the club, but tweaked up the waybills a bit to put a routing/block code at the top with a matching colour-coded bar for easier blocking/switching.

vanderheide.ca

Excel Car Cards and Waybills

Here I will discuss how I created my own car cards and waybills using Microsoft Excel's spreadsheet software. Note: this will not be intended to be a detailed tutorial on Excel, or the specific fea...
vanderheide.ca
 
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