Paper-first guide ยท Paper + digital guide
Guide 1: Paper-first operations
Best for: crews who want physical car cards, waybills, and printed switch lists or manifests. A phone or tablet is not required during the session.
- Set up the layout. In Configuration, select the layout. Add industries and their tracks in Layout Industries and yards, staging, interchange, and storage in Operating Locations. Enter capacities where useful.
- Create the roster. Enter freight cars in Rolling Stock and locomotives in Engine Roster. Use the print/PDF actions to make physical cards. Blank car and engine cards are available for handwriting new equipment details.
- Make waybills. In Waybills, assign a car and define its sequence of destinations and loads. Use 2, 4, 8, or 12 cycles as appropriate. Print the waybills; blank forms can be completed by hand.
- Prepare jobs. In Operating Sessions & Manifests, create a draft session and jobs. Include planned car moves and general instructions, such as picking up loaded cars at an industry. Print a manifest or switch list for each crew.
- Work the railroad. Give crews the printed instructions, car cards, and waybills. At each stop, match the card to the physical car, make the pickup or setout, and move the paper cards with the cars or the crew's train packet. Write changes and unexpected cars on the manifest.
- Finish the session. Collect completed paperwork, update car locations and advance waybill cycles when appropriate. If you track sessions digitally, enter or reconcile the paper results afterward; otherwise, the annotated paperwork is your operating record.
Paper tip: Keep car cards and waybills together in pockets or sleeves, with separate locations for yard tracks, industries, staging, and interchange. A printed manifest is a plan, not a restriction: crews should note actual work performed.
Guide 2: Paper + digital operations
Best for: a yardmaster who prepares jobs in the app, while engineers may use either printed paperwork or an offline device.
- Build the same foundation. Configure your layout, locations, tracks, car roster, engines, and waybills as described in the paper-first guide. In Equipment Locations, record the best-known current placement of each car.
- Plan a session. Open Operating Sessions & Manifests, create a Draft session, add jobs and switching moves, and use generic pickup instructions where the exact cars will not be known until the crew reaches the track. Review the jobs before changing the session to Ready.
- Hand out assignments. Print a manifest for paper users. Where the assignment QR workflow is available, an engineer can scan the manifest's QR code to load the initial job into their device. The QR shares the job assignment, not the complete layout database.
- Operate and record actual moves. Move physical cars and their cards as usual. Digital crews mark moves complete and record the cars actually picked up or set out, including multiple cars for a generic pickup. Crews can adjust work when the real railroad differs from the app's recorded locations.
- Return results. Paper crews hand back annotated manifests. Digital crews use the completion QR workflow to return completed or partially completed work to the yardmaster. Do not assume changes on separate devices synchronize automatically.
- Reconcile centrally. The yardmaster reviews returned work, handles conflicts or duplicate updates, confirms actual car locations, and chooses whether to advance waybill cycles. Move the session through In Progress to Closed when the work is complete and reconciled.
- Back up the layout. Use Backup / Restore to save or transfer the full layout data between browsers/devices. A backup file, rather than a job QR code, carries the complete roster and operating records.
Offline tip: Each device can have a different view of car locations. The physical railroad and the engineer's recorded moves take precedence over a stale recommendation. Reconcile before treating another device's data as authoritative.
Which approach should I use?
Paper-first: print everything needed before the session, then enter updates later if desired. Paper + digital: use printed cards as a reliable fallback while digital manifests help capture and reconcile actual moves. Both methods use the same roster, locations, and waybills.