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User Interface: Industries Tab

The Industries tab lets you name the places where your freight cars will pick up and drop off freight cars.

To add a new freight car, press the "Add" button and provide the named fields. To remove an existing freight car, select it and press the "Remove" button.

Each industry is associated with four pieces of information: its name, the town where it is located, its division, and the length of the spur in feet. If you have selected the "Spot cars at specific doors" option in the Layouts tab then the Industries tab shows two other bits of information: whether this industry will name the exact door or spotting location where a car should be placed, and if checked, the number of doors or spots at the industry. All these pieces of information can be changed at any time.

An industry can represent something large ("Chemical Plant") or a specific track in a large industry ("Chemical Plant Incoming", "Waste Track", "Chemical Plant Warehouse"). The industry name only needs to correspond to an explicit portion of track where your crews should place the car.

Industries can exist both in towns on the layout as well as "imaginary" industries in staging yards or offline towns. These can either be general ("Eastern Markets" is an industry on my layout, representing all traffic going to the east coast) or can be specific. Freight cars with cargos going to industries in staging or offline will be considered to arrive when they reach a location in staging.

Every layout also has a "Workbench" industry located in a "Workbench" town. If a freight car needs repair and is taken off the layout, place it in the "Workbench" industry.

Optional Features That May Not Be Visible

The "Has Doors" field allows you to complicate switching by requiring your crews to place freight cars in a specific order or at a specific spot on an industry track. If your "Car Plant Delivery" industry track has the "Has Doors" checkbox set and 3 doors, then switchlists may state that one car should be placed at "Car Plant Delivery #3" and another at "Car Plant Delivery #1". SwitchList will only assign one car at a time to a given door.

The "Has Doors" field only appears if the "Spot Cars At Specific Doors" option is turned on in the Layouts tab.

The "Spur Length" field lets you describe how many cars can fit on an industry spur track. If you've turned on Switch List’s option for limiting the number of arriving cars, then SwitchList will avoid sending cars to an overflowing spur. This switch is handy for smaller layouts with short industry tracks and few places for temporarily spotting overflowing cars.

The "Spur Length" field only appears if the "Move Cars Only If Space At Industry" option is turned on in the Layouts tab. Read more on this feature in the section on how SwitchList limits cars going to overflowing industry spurs.


Related Topics:

User Interface: Layouts Tab

Definition: Industry

Definition: Town in Staging

Definition: Offline Town

Detail: Divisions for cars and industries for more details on how a freight car's "Home Division" affects the assigning of cars to cargos.

Detail: Spotting Cars at Particular Doors

Detail: Moving Cars Only If Space At Industry