A New Look at LARS

By John D'Angelo with Lars Ljungberg

LARS in operation at the Fish Factory.

People can operate model railroads in a number of ways. They can just enjoy running trains, they can run a passenger schedule and they can move freight. LARS (Logistics And Resource System) is a system that allows automatic loading and unloading of freight cars when using Trainz. The system was created by Lars Ljungberg and can be gotten for free at TrainzProRoutes (www.trainzproroutes.org).

I wrote an article about LARS on when it was first issued (see the March 15, 2004 issue of VMRJ Journal at Virtual Railroader here). I suggest you read that article to understand the basics of LARS.

Since then LARS has been expanded and an additional operating system has been created. This new system is caller ProtoLARS. The primary difference between LARS and ProtoLARS is that LARS works with an instant loading or unloading of goods while ProtoLARS allows delayed loading or unloading. You can drop off a car at an industry and, after a preset time, come back and find the car has been loaded or unloaded.

While ProtoLARS is compatible with LARS, and you can have sidings that can use either system on the same route, they use different styled industry tracks and are configured differently. If you are using a LARS-compatible freight car, it will work with either type of industry; it will just work differently. LARS industries do not have buildings; they just have the track section allowing you to choose the type of building you would like to use to represent the industry. This makes it a very flexible system.

Lars Ljungberg has written an article that describes the new ProtoLARS system and I am incorporating his article here so that he can explain the system to you. Welcome Lars!

Lars:

Thank you John, it is a pleasure to be here and describe to you and your readers the new ProtoLARS system.

Introduction. LARS was developed to get a more prototypical and standardized way of handling new products. Prototype train cars are built with loading weight limits. Thus you may often have a car that is only partially loaded because the product it is carrying is very dense and would overload the car if the car were fully loaded with that product. These considerations have been incorporated into the LARS system. The Basic Industry (BI) is used for industries where overloading by weight is not a concern. The Basic Industry 2 (BI2) is used for industries where the maximum car weight IS a concern. In each case, a BI or a BI2 industry is just a track with no building or structure, so the route creator can more freely can select among available buildings and structures to be used.

Here is the Basic Industry that John set up at his Fish Factory to pick up frozen fish packets:

Object menu showing BI2 (Food).


Basic Industry 2 (BI2) track section (red arrows) placed alongside the building.


BI2 Food Loading menu.


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�2006 John D'Angelo. All rights reserved.