SwitchList allows you to define realistic cargos and traffic flows for your railroad. It also lets you easily create, remove, and adjust the list of potential cargos being carried on freight cars so you can set up potential cargos, and then adjust the cargos and their frequency to best meet fun and realism goals.
Choosing the right set of cargo shipments moving around your layout deserves some thought.
The cargo choices are important from the amount of fun or satisfaction they generate. The cargos represent the "moves" that make your operations interesting and fun. You want enough cars moving from industries to make the operators on each train feel like they're accomplishing something, so you want to make sure the flow of traffic into each of your towns sets up a reasonable amount of work. A train between towns A and B that only carries two cars won't be very fun. Similarly, a switch job that only requires simple switching moves (pull out all those cars, put in all these cars) may not be interesting enough for your operators.
But there's also the importance of making the cargos realistic so that your train crews believe that they're actually performing real roles on a real railroad:
A large cannery ought to have many boxcars coming and going to carry all its canned goods, or it will seem abandoned or unrealistic. A steel mill not producing a huge number of gondola loads of finished steel won't seem realistic.
A switch crew handling a gondola at a scrap yard won't be getting into the game of operations if the gondola is supposedly carrying "feather pillows" or "long weights".
A warehouse area or big city ought to be generating a huge amount of traffic, and should encourage your crews to be rushed and busy. A branch line going through the woods might carry less traffic, and your crews should understand they're doing a more easy-going job.
As you decide on cargos for your layout, keep all these issues in mind.
When you're ready to start setting up cargos in SwitchList, the first step is to think what might be arriving and departing from each of your industries. Sometimes, you already know likely cargos because of general knowledge of each industry or what you've seen local trains carry. Your cannery, for instance, must need to bring in cans, and ship out finished canned goods. You know a lumberyard will receive flatcars of lumber, and maybe the occasional boxcar.
Doing some simple research on different industries can also help. You might learn that some canneries would have received fruits and vegetables by train, or shipped in sugar for syrup or box material for crating the finished canned goods. Researching the oil industry might hint that most materials came in by tank car or boxcar. Old paperwork from railroads can also hint at the likely incoming and outgoing loads.
You can also turn to sources such as the OPSIG (Operations Special Interest Group) Industry Database, a list of real industries and the products each received and shipped for inspiration. If you've got a propane dealer industry in the Western U.S., check the industry database for similar industries. Ferrell Gas in Adamana, Arizona, received liquid petroleum gas (LPG), and shipped LPG and propane out.
When in doubt, make guesses about likely incoming or outgoing shipments, or put some generic name for contents. The exact contents matter more for realism, but the incoming and outgoing rates are more important for a fun operating session.
Each freight shipment on the railroad involves traveling between two locations— where the cargo is picked up, and where it's being sent to. This also affects realism; a cannery sending a boxcar a day to the next town over doesn't seem very realistic, but a cannery shipping product back east, or a steel mill receiving iron ore from Minnesota reinforces our ideas of realistic train movement. The OPSIG industry database can give some clues about likely sources of traffic, as can research.
But just saying "this refrigerator car of pork comes from the midwest" isn't enough because most sources for the different cargos won't be on your layout. You also need to make sure your model railroad has a likely path for the incoming cars to follow. Usually, this means having staging yards or some other sense of "offstage" where cars can come from. In SwitchList, you can do this two ways via "staging" yards that represent all offline locations, and explicit "offline" industries that don't exist on the layout. or .
On my "Vasona Branch" layout, all trains start from unscenicked "offstage" staging yards in "San Jose Yard" and "Santa Cruz", and come on-stage onto the layout to switch. Some cargos are assumed to come from those offstage towns, and the staging yards themselves count as the source for the cargos. Some of the gravel loads originate in "San Jose Yard", and go to a particular spur on the layout where new track is being built.
The other option is to create either specific or general offline locations to convey where cars are going. I define several offline towns and industries, usually with the same name "East Coast" industry at "East Coast" offline town, "Midwest" industry at "Midwest" town, etc. When I have a cargo that would realistically go to an industry in Chicago or New York, I choose one of these fake places as destination. In SwitchList, cars never reach an offline location; as soon as the car visits a staging yard, it's assumed to have made its way to the final offline location, and is turned around for its next trip.
In SwitchList, you can also create separate offline industries and towns to convey real receivers: "Paterno Wholesale Grocery" in "New York", where New York was an offline location. This can make cargos seem more realistic. However, this is a lot of work for little return; because cars never actually go to the offline destination, the final destination is never shown in any of the standard SwitchList paperwork, and so most operators will never see the destinations you create.
When you're choosing the offline source and destinations for cargos, make sure to keep the idea of "divisions" in mind. Divisions in SwitchList give you a way to indicate the direction trains should exit and the cars allowed to carry those cargos. Read Detail: Divisions for Cars and Industries for more information.
In SwitchList, cargos are always measured in the number of carloads per week that should be moving on the layout. By default, this represents the "average" number of shipments of that kind. Specifying "7 loads a week" means that on average one car a day should be moving the cargo, but random chance could mean two or three moving on one day, and none another day. Cargo rates are entered in the Cargo Tab as you enter information about the cargo. Alternatively, you can declare that there should always be exactly 14 cars a week or 2 cars a day by marking the "Fixed Rate" checkbox. Fixed Rate cargos will always appear at a constant rate (as long as there's available cars). The fixed rate must be a multiple of seven because the rate per day is rounded. Setting a fixed rate of 10 cars per week will get you exactly one car a day, not one car a day for two days and then two cars on the third day. Whether a fixed or random rate, SwitchList always assumes that each car will be loaded and unloaded in exactly one day, and be ready for its next movement in the operating session after it reaches a destination.
Choosing the exact cargo rate requires a bit of care to make sure you don't overload the industry's spur with too many cars, that the trains carrying the cars aren't overloaded, and that you don't starve other industries for cars by requesting too many for this industry.
Most importantly, the number of cargos shipped per week through a given industry should never be larger than the industry spur length times seven. If a spur only has room for two cars, then having more than 14 cars a week going to that spur will certainly overload the spur. (Remember to be thinking about *all* cargos going to a particular industry, both incoming and outgoing.)
You also might want some industries to be very busy, and others to be very quiet. An interesting, active chemical plant might have a total number of incoming and outgoing cargos close to the limit the siding can handle, while a team track in a small town might deserve to be empty most of the time, only getting one cargo a week. You'll want to balance the feel of each industry (quiet vs busy) against the amount of traffic you need to keep your layout busy and your operators interested. If you are only operating your layout yourself and want just a bit of operations to do occasionally, then low incoming and outgoing rates of cars is fine. If you're trying to keep several operators constantly busy and the layout is small, you may want the cargo rates to be high.
Finally, think about what the industry might actually need to consume. A lumberyard in a quiet town may only deserve a freight car every few days. (In the real world, it may only get a car weekly or monthly, but that wouldn't be much fun for a model railroad, so setting a rate so a car arrives every second or third session might better convey that the industry only gets a few cars.) A busy auto plant ought to be shipping and receiving lots of cars every day— enough for a dedicated switch crew, as occurs on real railroads.
Once you've decided on a set of cargos, try operating your layout with those choices. Watch for problems: overflowing sidings or industries that don't get enough cars, reasonable amounts of traffic on each train, whether certain car type get stuck at certain places because no trains can carry them, etc. The "Cargo Report" (in the Reports Menu) can help you here; it shows a large table listing the number of incoming and outgoing cargos (again measured in cargos per week), and grouped by car type. This report can help you see if two comparable industries have similar amounts of incoming and outgoing traffic, or if you don't have enough cargos for a particular car type.
Detail: Divisions for Cars and Industries
Detail: Layout Balance and Unavailable Cars
Detail: Difficulties in Car Movement
Definition: What are towns in staging?
Definition: What are offline towns?