The home page for my Car Forwarding Simulation (CFS) program.
Traditional computer based approaches to car forwarding on a model railroad can easily generate lots of activity, however the car movements are often random rather than being along a specific route to fulfill a prototypical shipment. These unrealistic car movements are a common criticism of such programs.
Individual Car Cards and Way Bills (CC/WB) on the other hand, can easily represent the richness of prototype shipments, but they require a lot of manual work to create, modify, use, and set up between operating sessions.
I am writing a new computer program to overcome both of these limitations. The first goal is to maintain the richness of the prototypical shipment based CC/WB system while eliminating all of its manual set up work between sessions.
Secondly, by simulating multiple days, it is easy to compare different operating scenarios as it is all just data inside a computer program. This is very useful for tuning car traffic on an existing layout, and can even influence new or expanded layout design by simulating a layout before it is even built.
Many of the ideas and concepts that make their way into the program are discussed here on the blog. Those posts are usually in the Category named Car Forwarding.
There is currently not a lot of documentation on the program, however the following files are available to download and provide more details.
Last Updated: 23 March 2020