Finally! I have posted a new SwitchList Generator "Activity Creation Template" for the Grove City Expasion, to my web site at www.skylinecomputing.com. I am also posting this to www.train-sim.com, although this usually takes 24 hours or so to show up.

I'm sorry it took so long! This route has so many spurs, so many switching opportunities, that I actually had to REWRITE SWITCHLIST GENERATOR to handle it!

Actually one of my users emailed me and said that there were so many railcars placed in the Canton-Suddenly-Thompson world that it was eating up resources, not only costing in frame rate but actually causing some SOUNDS to be missing! So I had to rethink the design of Switchlist Generator.

The original version (any version before version 2) relied on having all the right cars that you might need to pick up, already sitting in just about every spur, so they would be there if SwitchList Generator called for a pickup in that siding. This worked for most routes that had a lot of mainline and maybe 10 or 20 spurs. But with the Grove Extension this required more railcars than MSTS could reliably handle and was a resource hog. So when I rewrote the program, it's designed to need only one "marker" car in each spur (to tell the program what kind of car goes there and where the first car should be placed in the spur). And even THAT doesn't necessarily appear in the final, generated activity that you run. Instead, SwitchList Generator PLACES cars in the spurs as needed, and fills the yard tracks with cars to be set out on those spurs. There is also a new "fill world" function, so you can fill up every siding and spur (up to a safe maximum that MSTS can handle), for the look of a busy railroad (but longer load time and slower frame rates), or fill only the spurs where you'll be doing work. The choice is now yours.

Plus there are some other cool features, such as the ability to immediately convert all the switches in any route to manual (instead of dispatcher controlled), and to convert all signals to "permissive" (so if you get stuck behind a red signal and the dispatcher won't grant you permission to pass, you can actually save, exit MSTS, press the button on SLG to make the signals permissive, reload, and voila -- you will now be able to pass the signal at restricted speed! Think of the possibilities!

Well enough of that. If you already have SwitchList Generator, the version 2 upgrade is free. You need to go to the "Patches and Updates" page at www.skylinecomputing.com and download the "Version 2 Beta". It won't be on Beta much longer -- I and several others have been testing this for some time with good results.

There are other routes that I wouldn't have been able to create templates for without this: NEC 4.0, the new Seaboard Air Line Florida Division (with around 290 Spurs) and many others. This opens a whole new world of possibilities for Switchlist Generator and MSTS!

Maybe a SwitchList Generator template for Grove City is redundant because there are already so many great activities available for it. Please let me know if you find it useful/enjoyable.

--Steve Davis
SteveDavis@skylinecomputing.com
www.skylinecomputing.com

All I can say is SWEET!!!

Kerry