Recording moves

[ash39]

Not entirely sure where to place this thread but I suspect this is the place where the most experience on the subject will be...

How does everyone record their moves? I'm aware it's a personal thing and some will go into much more detail than others. I'm talking more about long term records as opposed to immediate on the move records.

I'm aware of sites like railmiles which look great on the face of it, but I'd worry about the long term possibility of the site closing or changing format into something I don't like (certain photo hosting sites have suffered a similar fate). I'm also keen to avoid a subscription when I'm reasonably skilled in excel.

I only started taking proper records at the start of 2015, and I've got around 200 moves on an excel sheet currently, so now is the time to make a change if I'm going to do it, before it gets too much work to change over.

At the moment I basically have a very basic format with the following fields;

Unit/loco
Station from
Station to
Mileage
Notes (i use this for any unusual routings or reason for travel)

My issue is it's basically a list with no meaning, I'd like to set it up to tell me how many times I've had a certain unit/loco, total mileage etc. I'm aware I'd probably need to type up a database of everything I'm likely to travel on for this to work, but I'm not opposed to that. It's the formatting I'm not sure on, how best to approach it.

If anyone has any advice or, even better, are willing to share a template of their own spreadsheets, I'm all ears.

Thanks

 

[507021]

I've only started recording properly since the start of last year, although I did make of note of trains used before then.

I record my journeys like this in my annual spreadsheets:

Date; Loco/Unit; Class; TOC; Start; Start time; Origin; End; End time; Destination; Mileage.

 

[Kite159]

I use an excel spreadsheet as my main logging database

Columns are:
Date, From, To, TOC, Miles, Chains, "Unit 1", "Unit 2", "Unit 3", "Unit 4", Notes

Notes being if the service used a particular route (i.e. Victoria to Bromley South via Denmark Hill or via Brixton)

With dud units/locos highlighted in red. Useful for doing reports as I can check when I last had a particular unit and if it was on a "bus stop leap" or a decent length trip

 

[ash39]

Thanks for the replies. I'd not even considered recording TOC's but I suppose it will be of interest in years to come when it's all change, will add that field to mine.

Kite, that's a good way of doing more than one unit or loco. Totally logical and I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of it before, I currently have one field for everything and just use a comma for more than one.

How do you apply the red to dud units, manually or is there some kind of formula that does it automatically?

 

[Kite159]

Thanks for the replies. I'd not even considered recording TOC's but I suppose it will be of interest in years to come when it's all change, will add that field to mine.

Kite, that's a good way of doing more than one unit or loco. Totally logical and I'm not sure why I hadn't thought of it before, I currently have one field for everything and just use a comma for more than one.

How do you apply the red to dud units, manually or is there some kind of formula that does it automatically?

Manually change it. 4 columns for units, for those quad 377/3 sets on Southern, Central Line and the SWT 159-159-158-158 morning peak 10-car service

One annoying thing with excel is that it thinks it be clever and automatically changes numbers to red if fields above are red (so a change to black before I run through checking against my book/LU & Light Rail log sheet)

 

[55013]

I use "Locotrack" - you can view it here: http://www.locotrack.co.uk/
It now costs £25 (I bought it about fifteen years ago - it's easy to keep up to date) but that's a one off payment and I've found it very useful over the years.
It's not perfect but it saves a lot of work.

In the unit haulage sections it has columns for, amongst other things, coach, unit, date, from, to, route, mileage and notes.
I record each unit separately. As an example, some recent entries look like this:

70402 377602 13/08/2016 East Croydon Victoria 10.5 With 377626 (Front)
......... 377626 13/08/2016 East Croydon Victoria 10.5 With 377602 (Rear)

I have a windows phone and use excel documents to keep track (boom, boom) of my unit and station requirements when out and about - I generally know if a loco is required or not, so don't have a similar spreadsheet for them, just a word document with mileages on.
I've also recently given Railmiles a try and do find it quite interesting - apparently I've done Bradford Interchange to Halifax 92 times so far this year!

 

[ash39]

The locotrack program looks good, if a little dated in presentation! I take it you can update it yourself rather than paying for the updates ?

I might explore excel option a bit further before going down that route, but it's an option.

If I was doing 1000's of moves a year I'd definitely be looking at something like locotrack or railmiles, but I only do around 100-150 currently.

 

[HMS Ark Royal]

I use paper and pen method on a day out - transferring to a large book when I get home.

My format is

Date

Unit/loco+DVT if there is one - departure - arrival - time - notes

 

[55013]

The locotrack program looks good, if a little dated in presentation!

I'm also a little dated in presentation, so it suits me nicely

I take it you can update it yourself rather than paying for the updates ?

Yes, easily.
As I said it's not perfect but if you want a handy list of all post 1948 locos as well as all current units (not light rail though, you have to add them yourself if you want them) then it can be a useful tool.

 

[Bill EWS]

I seem to recall that many programmes such as Word Processing, Desktop Publishing etc allowed you to save any page as a 'Template' which could be read by many different programmes. My method was to save every thing as a Basic Text file and they would be read by any new programme you may have had to move on to. Sometimes you had to redo formatting but a few actually kept their format, which was nice. I never lost any 'text', at least, from first using the very basic Atari 400, 600 and 800, to Atari FM, STE and then on a PC, which I have had three different computers since then.

 

[alex17595]

This is what I use to record my travels. I think I go a bit overboard sometimes.

 

[AJM580]

I use an excel sheet with date, loco/unit no, from, to, train details and mileage I then colour code each entry, red for loco cop, blue for dud loco, green for steam and pink for industrial and overseas, Units and LRT are black and all required stuff is in bold. I have further sheets to show miles behind each loco

 

[Techniquest]

I use RailMiles and have done for years now. For how much longer I'm not sure, the ching at £20 a year is getting a bit much. My page can be found at techniquest.railmiles.me if anyone wishes to have a look.

My moves get recorded a little like this, an example of a move from Monday:

29/08/2016

377164+377154, in 78754, East Croydon - Clapham Junction (0608, 3d, arr 0621)

Light rail gets recorded a little differently. So let's explain the above:

Loco/MU gets written down first, then the coach number I'm travelling in if I need one of them in the formation, then the origin of the move, the destination of the move, scheduled departure time, delay (or even early running) and finally arrival time. If I know the scheduled arrival time, I also record if it's on time, early or late.

 

[Islineclear3_1]

I use pen and paper, but only to record trains that I photograph. Date, time, location, weather unit/loco number and as much detail of working as possible - e.g.

Thursday 1st September 2016, Radlett
Cloud/sun
319.006 1W42 10.14 Luton - Sutton via Wimbledon

Personally I'm not really interested in/or have the time to record anymore what I travel on and where but as I take many, many photos, I can't remember unless I write them down

 

[theblackwatch]

When out and about I record everything in a notebook using an old fashioned device known as a biro. I keep all my moves books, they're good to look back at sometimes!.

For locos, I have a simple excel spreadsheet denoting the loco, date, move and mileage, without any other trivial information. 'Winners' appear in bold. I have similar sheets for DMUs and EMUs, but I'm a bit behind with them (the 1990s!), but I do have a simple list of what I require.

I also have a loco summary sheet I do each year, which gives me the mileage off each loco. Screengrabs from both my loco lists are attached.

 

[Kristofferson]

RM tables can be copy pasted into Excel as a backup, by the way


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

 

[Techniquest]

RM tables can be copy pasted into Excel as a backup, by the way


Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

Cheers, I may need reminding of that in the next year!

 

[DarloRich]

just record whatever you like. There is no right or wrong option.

 

[55013]

Agreed.
I've seen a few people get worked up about possibly doing it "wrong".
Just do it how you want to.

 

[37038]

When out and about I record everything in a notebook using an old fashioned device known as a biro. I keep all my moves books, they're good to look back at sometimes!.

For locos, I have a simple excel spreadsheet denoting the loco, date, move and mileage, without any other trivial information. 'Winners' appear in bold. I have similar sheets for DMUs and EMUs, but I'm a bit behind with them (the 1990s!), but I do have a simple list of what I require.

I also have a loco summary sheet I do each year, which gives me the mileage off each loco. Screengrabs from both my loco lists are attached.

I note a spell mistake in your screenshot there Dave

 

[ash39]

Thanks all. Just to reiterate, it wasn't what to record that I was struggling with, more how to record it.

I've now got a single excel file which does everything I wanted it to, plus a couple of extra bits I thought up along the way. The format is finished, one big moves list which is the only place I need to input data. Then I have various class tabs which take their data from the moves list automatically using formulas to give me information on requirements, mileages etc.

It will take a while to add all the classes, it's a copy and paste table but overwriting the numbers in the formulas is a bit time consuming. The beauty of it is I can do it as and when I feel like it.

Will add some screenshots tomorrow if anyone is interested.

 

[Techniquest]

Very interested in the screenshots. I rely heavily on RailMiles for everything mileage wise, so if I hit a page on there with 502 Bad Gateway I'm stuffed!

 

[ash39]

Very interested in the screenshots. I rely heavily on RailMiles for everything mileage wise, so if I hit a page on there with 502 Bad Gateway I'm stuffed!

Sorry forgot about this...

See attachments. Since I wrote the last post I realised how stupid I was being, after typing every 142 into the criteria part of a lookup formula, I realised if I just made the criteria 'A2' and then drag the forumla down the spreadsheet I could save myself countless boring hours... so it's now finished. Got tabs for every class I'm likely to travel on, and I can add others as and when I need to using the existing tabs as a template.

Excuse the screenshots, they were taken from Excel on my phone. They're a bit easier to read on a screen.

 

[Techniquest]

Some interesting bits in there, I particularly like the part where you can see how many times you've visited a station. I don't want to think about how many times I've had a journey start or end at Hereford, although equally I'd like to see the figure every so often.

Looks like a good spreadsheet you've got going there, I must start playing with Excel Mobile myself. I used to know lots about it, but over the last 13 years or so it's all gone from memory. I even used to know how to use Access!

 

[Kite159]

Some interesting bits in there, I particularly like the part where you can see how many times you've visited a station. I don't want to think about how many times I've had a journey start or end at Hereford, although equally I'd like to see the figure every so often.

Looks like a good spreadsheet you've got going there, I must start playing with Excel Mobile myself. I used to know lots about it, but over the last 13 years or so it's all gone from memory. I even used to know how to use Access!

I dread to think how many times London Waterloo would pop up for me!