Steve or anyone
I'm in the process of back-dating a template from modern locos to first generation power so I can use the wags and locos the route author used in his origional route. The origional route had car "strings" (to save computer memory usage) that have a .wag extension which was OK when I ran the origional activities that came with the route.

Wanting to use AG and a template I downloaded to generate my own activities I used AM to change out the cars.
When I used AM to replace cars with a like cars AM looked at the "strings" wags as active cars and added approx 35 of them to the running and loose consists. I worked out the problem with con-builder by editing out the "strings".

My question is there a work around using wild cards in AM so I can block these cars or would it be easer to move the wag files for these "string" cars when I exchange the cars and then place them back? I't only around 6 "strings" that are the problem.
The reason I ask as this was for the south bound template for this route and I will be back-dating the north bound template next month.

Thank you all in advance.

Peter

Peter,

I had the same issue with some activities that I had created and used strings as well. I have dealt with them a couple of ways since I don't think AM has the ability to work with wildcards. (Correct me if I'm wrong Steve!) To keep AM from just using the "strings", I gave them a different car type code. I use "Car-Strings" for all of the strings rather than BX or TOFC etc. This way they never show up as a replacement for any cars that I plan to change since AM uses Boxcars for Boxcars etc. I can only exchange strings for strings. I usually leave them alone due to the fact some of the strings can be quite long and could cause a problem if a longer one is used to replace a shorter one. One could assign them differently, but for me, that was not important. Now, to change them out, I changed a couple boxcars, and some other cars of my choosing, to the same car type as the strings. That was "Car-Strings" for me. I should point out that I also use car groups in AM to narrow down the number and types of cars that I want to make available. By changing the car type on a few cars, this enabled me to swap out all the cars that I had in the "Car-Strings" type. Once I had them swapped out, I would run AM again with another car group of my choosing that fit the era I was trying to re-create. I've done the same thing to swap out articulated TOFC sets as well. Those I use a group named ART, for articulated cars.

Jim

Jim,
Great idea, I use car types for all kinds of sorting, and I never thought of calling a box / hopper car string a string!!!!

Thank you and have a great day.

Peter