Ship-It Automates Car Cards and Waybill Generation
For Model Railroad Operations.

For several years I used the model railroad software program for train operation called Ship-It! by Albion Software (http://www.albionsoftware.com)

Ship It! automates the process of generating operating sessions and removes the labor intensive writing of waybills. It is not just a random car movement generator. It is designed to function like the real world: shippers request empty cars of a specific type to send products to industry consignees who have ordered product.

Loads and empties are routed across divisions via interchange trackage.
Hidden and fiddle staging are supported.
Both loads and empties are scheduled.
Cars move on scheduled trains.
Car lading and location are tracked through time.
Everything in the database can be printed.
Switchlists can be printed as condensed or full with Conductor and Engineer instructions.
Databases can be exported to Car Cards or an inventory program called Railbase Professional.

These are just a few of the features. At the moment we are using MicroMark's car card waybill system on my Utopia Northern to work out some route problems. ShipIt also allows printing out car card waybills.

*Ship-It switchlist*

This is a typical Ship-It switchlist. These scans aren't very clear. If you go to the Albion website there are samples of the forms you may review. The program's switchlist and database reports can be very detailed. Ship-It uses random generation to create the switchlists based on the parameters you set. You also have to make sure that there's a train that will go to the town or city where the industry is located. You can also set it up so trains can pick up in both directions or only one direction to avoid runarounds. There all kinds of wrinkles you can add. You can assign specific locomotives and vans (cabooses). You can run passenger trains, through trains, local freights and trains in and out of staging.

*Closeup of Ship-It switchlist*

Here's a close-up of that same switchlist with pickups and setouts ticked off. After the car's reporting marks and numbers is a column for pickups followed by set-outs and car lading. There is one farther column to the right showing final destination. This could be by another train depending on where the car is going at this time in this train's schedule.

I recommend this program. It does require you to look at the reporting marks and numbers on cars. During a recent Northeastern Region Convention (NER) one modeler working in N scale found it difficult to see the small numbers. He decided to move his cars as blocks to avoid hunting for individual cars.

I have about 150 freight cars in my database. After awhile my operators get to associate numbers with particular cars which makes it easier to track them down in a yard or at an industry. There are a number of database reports available as well as reports to help debug your system to make it function better.

I'll admit that there is a learning curve. The instructions are very easy to follow. If you are already a Ship-It owner I also recommend that you buy Jean Piquette's Deluxe Balancer model railroad software program. This is a companion piece that helps you organize your database and balance the cars you have against the industries' needs. Jean has been working with this program for a long time and is extremely knowledgeable and helpful. Check it out at http://mysiteverizon.net/vzeoIlq4.

You can also use it for inventory. There is a Chat Group on the Internet to help with the program and all aspects of prototype and model train movement.

After you get everything working and have some friends over to play with the trains, you can introduce a Fast Clock to operate your layout in scale time.

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