1. Open the Data Management window and click the command button labeled Stations.
2. Click on the New command button.
3. Type the full spelling of the city in which the station is located in the Station City text box, and type the state two-letter abbreviation in the Station State text box.
4. Enter the rest of the information as required; some settings have ramifications such as:
High Priority - will cause railcars destined to this location to display on the Railcars not moving report after they have not moved for more than the hourly threshold entered in the High Priority Delay Hours reference value, which defaults to 24 hours (see Help topic Reference Values, High Priority Delay Hours). If this is not selected, railcars destined to this location will display on the Railcars not moving report according to the reference value Normal Priority Delay Hours, which defaults to 48 hours.
Origin or Destination? - the Out of Route daily report also uses this setting to identify railcars destined to stations that are not identified as an origin or destination.
Note:
Some stations can have many aliases and some can have only one. You must enter at least one alias. If all aliases are not entered for each station, almost all reports will be affected and will be incomplete.
This manual does not intend to teach about abbreviations and recommends that the user does an in-depth study to gather all the various spellings of all stations in the distribution route network. However some rules of thumb regarding abbreviated spellings (aliases):
All aliases have 9 characters or less. Many times the 3-3-3 standard is used (usually for current location city on a railcar sighting record). The 3-3-3 standard builds an alias as the first 3 characters of a location's first name; the first 3 characters of a location's 2nd name (if applicable) and the first 3 characters of a location's 3rd name (if applicable). East, West, North, South are abbreviated to one character: E, W, N, S. Fort is FT. There are several other rules; it is recommended that you contact your rail carrier if you have questions. For example: Fort Worth = FTWORTH; Salt Lake City = SALLAKCIT; East Bridge Junction = EBRIJUNCT.
Many times the first 9 characters are used (usually for destination city on a railcar sighting). For example: Fort Worth = FORT WORT or FT WORTH; Salt Lake City = SALT LAKE; East Bridge Junction = EAST BRID or NEW ORLEA.
Alias abbreviations can be very confusing, so again, it is recommended that aliases be gathered from empirical research (actually looking at the spellings) because there are so many variations.