Railfan Technology > TD 3 is being upgraded to RD 1

There's a bunch of computer whizzes who are working on a new dispatcher's sim, based on Train Dispatcher 3. They're calling it Rail Dispatcher [RD 1]. You can read all about it by joining the Yahoo group called Dispatch Central. If you're not familiar with the group, you can access a bunch of territories to dispatch, but you must already have bought the program from the now-defunct company who produced it in the first place.

Great news. I've enjoyed Train Dispatcher 3 for years, and have a bunch of territories. Hope they will make a successful comeback.

I wonder if they have any relationship to the TSCAD (Train Simulator Computer Aided Dispatcher) being developed as a third-party dispatching add-on for Run 8: http://www.run8cad.com/. If they do, it would make sense to create a product that could be run as a free-standing dispatching simulator, or which could interact with a rail operating simulator like Run 8.

The functionality descriptions and the dispatcher board diagrams of TSCAD are very similar to the old Train Dispatcher. When the developers first started promoting TSCAD in the Run 8 community, I was immediately struck by the similarities. The other currently available third-party dispatching tool for Run 8, External Dispatcher, runs somewhat differently from the old TD3 and from the way that TSCAD is being described. It's quite good and has some nice features, but the rather TD3-like form-and-function of TSCAD seem more authentic to me. It sure looks like TSCAD will share some of the form-and-function of the old TD3.

MC
Columbia, Missouri