SimSchedule

SimSchedule is the proprietary tool used for editing timetables in a format that makes improvements on the older MS Access (.mdb) method of creating and editing timetables.

Structure

Timetables created using SimSchedule are saved with the extension .timetable extension, but internally, the data is a file structure enclosed in a Zip file. You can take any .timetable and rename the extension to .zip and work with it the way you would with any .zip file.

The benefits of having timetable data files inside a zip file (as opposed to tables in an MS Access database) are:

• the data, in its raw form, is human-readable and human-editable
• database developers are not limited to using a single program for editing (theoretically, someone could make a tool to edit the data better than SimSchedule does)
• backwards compatibility (the ability to add new features without breaking old ones)
• data transparency (there are no mysteries in how the data is stored and edited)

Special Dates

This data supercedes the MDB Timetable table SpecialDates.

Special dates like Christmas, New Year's, and country or region-specific holidays (like Queen's Day in the Netherlands) can be defined here. Dates are defined using both day, month, and year, as some holidays occur on different dates in different years. If the timetable designer wants to have a holiday defined for a 5 year period, then 5 entries need to be made for that specific holiday.

The result of a train running on a special date is that the schedule is the same as it would be for the day of the week that's specified. If you define Christmas to be like a Sunday, then trains running on Christmas will run as though it were a Sunday, even if Christmas falls on weekday.

This screen allows for the names of special dates to be localised.

Period Templates

Period templates are useful when creating many trains with commonly-used periods in which they run or do not run.

Translations

In order to localise remarks/train instructions in trains, you have the option to construct those pieces of text using short codes that are replaced with localised strings upon loading each train.