Large Scale Central

Tweaking JMRI Operations

ECLSTS got me revved up to get running trains and crappy weather got me to expand my indoor track to add some operational interest. Of course the new cars and track were added to JMRI to create manifests to move some cars around the basement with a purpose.

As usual, the movements weren’t exactly what I wanted the first few times through. I found the Build Report a very easy to understand tool that shows exactly why cars aren’t moving that you think should.

Using the output of the report I spotted some mistakes in my locations. Once corrected, cars began to move as expected. I’ll be sure to use this tool once outdoor operations resume to tweak the trains some more!

Next up for me is experimenting with two distinct scales in the same database. I think I can use the Car Owner field to restrict cars from being moved by the wrong scale train. I have set up all my 1:20 stock as owner “Fn3”. I plan to add my 1:29 stock with owner “G29”.

I tried restricting my current trains to only move cars owned by Fn3. So far that doesn’t seem to be working for every car as some get ignored due to this restriction - I may have some extraneous characters in the names I typed by hand screwing up the data. I’ll try again setting the owner by drop-down in Edit Cars.