Model Operations Processing System

Just spotted a bug setting up a local directory in Linux; I have a fix available which will be included in the next release.  Anyone wanting it earlier please drop me a line at admin [at] railmops [dot] net.

Welcome to MOPS!  MOPS is designed to support an operational aspect to running model railroads and railways.  Using MOPS provides a reason for running trains and moving cars and wagons – industries want their products moved!  You can read more about MOPS here.

MOPS is based on the type of mainframe system that was used fro the early 70s until now, and is text-based!  Systems during that time didn’t have mice, windows or graphics, and MOPS replicates that feel.  But once a limited number of commands are known, using MOPS becomes fast and easy.

MOPS is available for download here, and includes a User Guide, a Quick Reference Guide and some sample data.

Please be aware that installing MOPS does require a limited amount of computer knowledge, but full instructions are given in the guide.

If you do download and use MOPS, please let me know by emailing me at admin [at] railmops [dot] net.

MOPS has been released under a free licence.  To read the licence, click here.

For those that haven’t been following, we’ve been having a countdown to the release of MOPS v1.0.  Planned release date is tomorrow, 31 July 2010.

MOPS has been over a year in the making, consists of about 17,000 lines of code and has taken in the region of 1200 hours to develop.

Is it finished?  the short answer is no – there are a number of features I want to add.  But at some point you have to draw the line to define the ‘base system’.  Among the features that are likely to appear at some point are:

• Schedule Tracking: MOPS is currently passive about whether a train is on schedule, and these improvements would make MOPS more pro-active in terms of advising of late trains, giving improved estimates of arrival, etc.
• History database:, so you can see what’s been run (trains, car flows).   This history suite would let you see volumes of cars that were run, weight carried over a traffic flow, and performance against timetables.
• Visual Tracker: a graphics view of where trains are.  This would probably be a separate GUI module that plugged into MOPS and would be reasonable simple (trains would either be at a station or on a route).

That’s all for the future.  Tomorrow is the release of version 1.

For details of what MOPS does, see the About page from the right hand bar.  The software will be downloadable from the Software page.

MOPS Guides are updated and turned into pdfs; web site has been updated.

Putting the package together…

I’m pleased with how MOPS looks and behaves; that’s not to say that there isn’t more to do and that it couldn’t be improved – over the next few months I am sure that there will be a lot of changes as bugs are taken out, usability improved and additional features added.  But as a foundation for the system that I set out to build, it’s achieved the original aims.

The Quick Reference guide is complete; a two-fold pamphlet which has got all the day-to-day commands and associated parameters on it.  The User Guide itself has just a couple of small amendments to make.  The documentation is nearly there!

The next step is to package the code and the documentation into one zip file, then load that onto the web site.

And finally, tweaks to the web site itself.