A Free Ops Session Generator and Switchlist Building Tool
With smaller layouts, each industry plays a very large role in how an operating session plays out. If traffic that arrives or departs from one industry feels off, it can impact the entire session negatively.
I am modeling a small branchline operation in a quiet part of the country, which means not every industry will receive cars every day and the ones that do may not necessarily fill up their tracks with cars every time. I tried with some of the available switchlist tools to add a good level of “controlled randomness” to my ops sessions that would feel natural while making each session feel unique and different. Unfortunately, while the randomness these tools provided may work for one or two sessions, I found that after a few sessions, something would happen that did not fit my layout at all and it really broke the immersion I was trying to achieve. Try as I might, I could not solve this problem in those apps, so I decided to make my own!
OpsBuddy is a free ops session generator and switchlist building tool designed specifically for smaller model railroads and shelf-style layouts where fewer industries and less traffic is the norm. You can access OpsBuddy here: https://docs.google.com/…/1y8jbRy0lxMm…/template/preview (NOTE: To save a copy of OpsBuddy, click on the “Use Template” button in the upper right. A Gmail account is required to edit and save the document.) Feel free to adjust it and make changes to meet your own operational requirements.
To help you get started, I’ve put together a few videos showing how to use the tool.