Random Traffic Generator

typo aside (hehehe) i do remember reading about one. If it still exists Spike Coleman will have it or a mention of it on his site: The Webville & Hypertext Railroad

You probably saw a reference to Tim O'Conner's CLE.BAS program, a freight car forwarder. I have re-written it in C++ & Tcl/Tk as part of my Model Railroad System (available for download from

I've written my own one in QBASIC. (work in progress) The problem of making it transferable is that the program is almost totally variables. As I'm an ex-factory production planner and later international shipping planner I probably am too aware of most of those variables. :-)

The simplest program would be one that listed each industry and randomly generated a number for loads in and out per operating session and printed that out.

Greg.P.

One of the problems with the CLE.BAS program was the numerious parallel arrays, which were implementing arrays of structures.

For a really clever program, you need to associate what sort of loads an industry can take, what sort of empties it can take, and what sort of loaded cars it can reload with something else. It really makes no sense to keep delivering coal cars to your Kellogs factory or autoracks to your grain silo... You also need to keep track of how many feet of siding you have available.

I assumed we knew that. :-)

You also need to keep track of how many feet of

Well no, an industry is going to need what it's going to need! It's not a perfect world and your coal fired piano works may well have the need for two loads of coal on the same day it needs to ship six consignments of pianos, even though it's siding will only hold two wagons. It still needs the timber consignment and the fabricated metal components on the same day. These things happen and the railroad does it's utmost to deliver the service so that the company doesn't feel compelled to move to trucking. Meanwhile the railway has to hold the other eight wagons at it's closest yard ready for delivery.

This brings 'empties' into importance in the program. Wagons beyond your yard capacity have to be held elsewhere. Industries not on your layout also need servicing so that line of empties in the yard you were relying on suddenly are needed elsewhere. Wagons need cleaning. Some loads are incompatible with previous loads carried so wagons may need to be cleaned or even get special treatmen. The result is that a simple program gets bigger and bigger as you introduce _important_ factors - seasonal traffic for example!

Greg.P.

Greg Procter wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@ihug.co.nz:

Welcome to software development! Just like model railroading, the key is not to do it all at once but to get basic functionality working and add to it later.

Puckdropper

I never wanted to be a software developer, but no commercial offering I know of does what I want.

Greg.P.

from

Now you know how a new open source project gets started.

Does the Freght Car Forwarder program that is part of the Model Railroad System (a *free* Open Source package) do what you want?

I never found anyone else who was interested - remember, mine is in English, not American.

Regards, Greg.P.

To be honest, I don't know of it. But for a start, it would have to be titled "Goods Wagon forwarder" to be acceptable. That's only half joking, given that if it's open source then I assume I could change the terminology.

Greg.P.

Heh, I was about to ask if there was a such thing as a non-free open source package, then I remembered the BSD license.

Of course! And if there was a demand for it, I could probably set it up with a locale database and have it check the current system locale setting and use the proper local terminology (this would even work for non English speaking countries).

The data files need to be created manually. Most of the data is 'constant' (or as constant as your model train layout) -- the only data files that the system modifies are the cars and stats files. Several of the files are constant across all layouts: cartypes.dat, hazard.dat, plate.dat, and weight.dat. I suggest that you download one of the sample data sets look them over, then create a set that matches your layout.

Err, I live in New Zealand and model the Royal Wuerttemberg State Railroad of 1920.

Or just a user editable .ini file where the could customize titles and labels and terms, or use pre-set .ini's supplied by you or the user community?