Car-forwarding with Filemaker

Way back when, I made a card waybill system with the little library-card pockets and the card with four waybills that you flipped around to start a new "cycle" of car movements. With this railroad I started doing that again, but pretty soon I hit the point of saying, 'Come on -- this has GOT to be easier on a computer."

So I opened up Filemaker (Mac) and got to work.

Now I have a database of all my freight cars (30 of them so far) that includes roadname, number, car type, an image of the actual car, eight different destinations, loads and receicers (the equivalent of two of those old flippable waybill cards), and a special index number (1-8) that determines where each car is in its eight-destination cycle.

Through some creative script writing and querying, I just need to open the database and run a script called "Increment Cars." Each car's index number increases by one (except if it's eight, in which case it pops back to one). Then I can view the database as a form, and see where each car needs to go next from where it is now.

Here's a screenshot of one of my cars in the main database:



When the script is run, it looks at the "stage" number (right underneath the image), then uses it to look up the right destination data from the list. It then uses that info to populate fields called "Current Destination," "Current Contents" etc., and presents the info along with that of all the other cars in a different query form or "layout." The result is a tabular list of the day's movements that I can sort, print out and take down to the basement, and which looks like this:



Note how each car is now listed with current contents, destination, current location, etc. Now I just need a giant plasma monitor for the basement wall! Actually, it is best just to take the laptop down there, because then I can just sort the list according to my needs. Need to find out which cars are headed out of the North Chattanooga branchline today? Sort by current holder. Need to see how big the incoming branchline train will be? Sort by current destination. Want to see all the cement hoppers and sort them out? Sort by car type.

The labor-intensive part was entering all that destination info from a few dozen freight cars. But once that's done, all you need to do is enter each new freight car purchase into the database, and that's really kind of fun. Also, if you find yourself having traffic problems, you can tweak the the "stage" values for various cars, and stagger what is going where, when. It's the equivalent of flipping just one of your waybill cars to a different destination and changing the cycle.