What's New in Rail Ops
Greetings and Happy New Year!
This update is very overdue, but let’s start 2025 off with a bang! I hope to make these emails more regular and include things such as recent app updates, tips and tricks, and info about features coming soon.
There were several major features added to Rail Ops in 2024, after the initial beta release. Here's a quick recap of them:
New Roster Item List Layouts
We now have three different layouts for viewing roster lists: Grid, Photo Card, and Table/List view. You can easily switch between the views by clicking on the “eye” icon on the right side of the screen above the items. If there are additional views you’d like to see, feel free to let us know using the contact info at the end.
Sharing Collections
You can now generate shareable links to share collection information with others. When generating the links you can choose whether or not to include locomotives, cars, or both. Links can also be set to auto-expire after a date of your choosing. We think this could be especially helpful for those who share collections with other modelers, those looking to sell a collection, or if you have someone assisting you with operations management. We plan on iterating on this feature shortly, so let us know what you think.
Initial Car Card Support
A few months ago, we introduced an initial release of car card generation support. Currently, we only have support for one format of car cards, but will be adding more soon. If you have a specific format you’d like to see, please share it with us and we’ll add it for consideration. You can learn more about generating car cards in the docs.
Related to car cards, we also added a few more operations-focused data fields to cars (rolling stock). There will likely be even more to come shortly.
In addition to the car cards, we are looking at adding support for locomotive cards to include consist info, DCC function mapping, and other useful information. We’re also thinking it would be useful to have this on a mobile view as well if you want operators to be able to view it without printing it off. As always, we’re open to feedback and ideas on this.
Tip: Adding Roster Items
Did you know that there are three ways to get your roster information into Rail Ops?
Manual entry via the web app forms
JMRI Plugin - import from your JMRI roster
Coming Soon
In 2025 we look forward to bringing these features to Rail Ops. More to come soon:
Expanded sharing control, including sharing with other Rail Ops users so they can see your collections alongside theirs.
Roster Item Maintenance Tracking: If you have a maintenance routine for your locomotives and cars, or even a “qualification” process, we want to help you keep track of that.
Mobile app with offline support - access your roster information right from your mobile device, even when you don’t have an internet connection (for when you’re in those dead spot train shows and hobby shops ;)).
If you haven’t created an account yet, sign up today to start managing your roster! We look forward to bringing you more features in 2025!
Feel free to reach out to us with comments, suggestions or questions at matt@mattmillican.com - please make sure “Rail Ops” is in the subject.
Cheers,
Matt