What is D-Rose?

D-Rose is Dave's Railroad Operations Simulation Environment. It simulates running an entire railroad. You (will soon) get to do any job on the railroad (like dispatcher, surveyor, president and engineer), or sit back and watch.

News and History

• 09/06/2006 - unstable-0.03.01 released.
• 11/18/2005 - unstable-0.03.00 released.
• 12/16/2003 - stable-0.02.00 released.
• 08/05/2003 - unstable-0.01.03 released.
• 05/19/2003 - unstable-0.01.02 released.
• 05/09/2003 - unstable-0.01.01 released.
• 04/19/2003 - unstable-0.01.00 released.
• 04/01/2003 - Got SourceForge account accepted, and started setting it up.

Current Features

• Create a map, lay rail lines, add passenger stations, schedule passenger trains (as of 0.02.00)
• Set the clock speed and watch trains run according to their schedule (as of 0.02.00)
• Configure sidings, multi-track and crossovers on a rail line (as of 0.03.00)

Features Coming Soon (in the next couple of releases)

• Ability to edit a junction, to configure # of tracks to be connected to other legs of junction, from each direction.
• Ability for program to use multi-track and sidings, (and hence trains will stop magically passing through each other, as they do in 0.02.00)

Current Status

stable-0.02.00, the first "stable" release, is now out! It will let you lay track, schedule trains, and watch the trains run between stations. Please keep in mind that this is very rudimentary stuff (see the screenshots for just HOW rudimentary), but it's a start just the same.

unstable-0.03.01 is the latest "unstable" release. It has all of 0.02.00, plus a rail editor, to allow you to configure sidings, multi-track and crossovers on your rail lines.

For up-to-the-minute status, Check out the D-Rose blog for daily notes on what I'm doing.

Some info about versions:

• Odd-numbered releases (0.01.x, 0.03.x, etc.) are called "unstable", meaning that they probably have bugs, and have features that may not work together as a program.
• Even numbered releases (0.02.x, 0.04.x, etc.) are called "stable", meaning that they should have many fewer known bugs, and while the feature set may not be complete, the features that do exist should work together fairly cohesively.
• "stable" releases will only have new features in the first release of a series, (i.e. 0.02.00), while subsequent point-releases (i.e. 0.02.01) will be bug fixes only.
• If you don't understand all this, then only download "stable" releases. The "unstable" ones are for the brave (or desparate for a new feature).

Technical Info

D-Rose is written in Python/wxPython, and as such, is cross-platform. It will be tested and actively supported on Linux and Mac OS X, and perhaps Windows (although I'm not running Windows at the moment, nor do we run it at work). At present, though, you need to know (or figure out) how to setup Python/wxPython on your platform to run D-Rose. (See install.txt in the download file for more info.) In the future, I'll be looking into proper packaging (i.e. self-installing zips, RPMs, DEBs, Gentoo eBuilds, etc.) for the various supported platforms, but for now, you get to do all that.