Hi all,

I’ve got a couple newbie questions regarding the handling of rolling stock etc. in both programs. I just downloaded and installed both programs and admittedly haven’t finished reading the manuals for both. What I was trying to do was customize the “type” and “load?” fields in the “RSLIST.CSV” file. I found a little info in the thread “cartypes.csv” dated April 28, 2007 which seems to have answered some of what I’m looking for, but not everything.

1) It looks like the “type” fields can be changed, but not the “load?” fields. I had initially changed a number of the load fields only to find when I started AM again, these fields where changed back. Is there a way to keep the changes made to this field?
2) I’ve found that I have a lot of rolling stock in the RSLIST (I’m sure not as much as others have) that doesn’t give enough info as to whether the wagon is loaded or empty, which would at least allow me to change the type description to something more meaningful, such as CL or CLMT. Is there a program that can look at all the .wag files and determine whether the wagon is loaded or empty.

I apologize for what some might see as dumb questions, and yes, if I had finished reading both manuals my questions may have been answered.

Thanks in advance for your help,

Doug

As for question 1, you have the answer listed in question 2. The load field is not used at all, since we generally distinguish the loads vs. empties for a given car type by using E or MT or something similar, as in CL and CLMT (which would be loaded coal car and empty coal car) in your example.

As for question 2, I know of no program which will sort through car files and list which ar loaded and which are empty. For those cases where it is not obvious for a particular car whether it is loaded or not, you can look at the car weight and make an educated guess.

Not dumb at all! Norm's response is correct, I am not currently using the "Load" and "Empty" designators, partly because there may be many DIFFERENT KINDS of loads, which aren't always interchangeable. This is especially the case with open hoppers, gondolas and flat cars.

So I might name a flat OR gon with steel coils, "STL". Or you could differentiate by F-STL and G-STL or however you'd like to handle. I use ShapeView which can be accessed from directly within ActivityMaster to look at cars where I am not sure if they are loads etc. and then assign the types to them.

One caveat: we do NOT recommend that you edit RSDB.CSV directly unless you are extremely comfortable with working with comma delimited files, saving as .csv and make a backup first. For most users we strongly advise that you use the edit buttons built in to Activity Master to make any changes, as outlined in the manual.

Thanks and enjoy!

--Steve Davis