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Short Line Data Systems Inc. ROCS Update – June 2003
Website: www.sdsrocs.com
Greetings –
We have recovered from the ASLRRA Annual Meeting and Exhibition last week, and we would like to congratulate the association on one of the best meetings ever. We spent a lot of time with many railroads and gave out a ton of hoppers (the wind up kind not the rail kind), pens, and brochures. The reception to the ROCS system was very good, and some of you made some great suggestions, some of which you will see as new projects that we are already working on.
New Personnel
Those of you who were in Philadelphia might have noticed a new face in our booth. Joel Primer has joined us on a part time basis to help with new customers and setting up their systems. Joel has many years of Access experience with his job at Baker & Taylor, a major book distributor. New customers will be hearing from one of us as we move ahead with setting up their systems, and in the near future he will be covering some nights for customer service.
New Features
A new feature that we have added to the car hire system is a reclaim report. This report has both detail records and an Appendix N, and is set up to whatever reclaim deals you might have.
A feature that we are working on from railroad suggestions is a wider UMLER record retrieval. This will provide the user with the full UMLER record for a car or locomotive, which will include the air brake date. As with the other data retrieval functions in ROCS, the data will be requested and downloaded automatically, and updated each time the equipment comes on line. The anticipated completion for this feature will be the end of June – beginning of July, and will be the main new feature of release 2003.6B.
While not exactly a new feature, we will be offering a new service to very small railroads. If there is a very small railroad that would like the ROCS system but does not have the personnel to handle the data processing requirements, we will offer the system with us doing the data input for a slightly higher price. This will not be a 24 hour data processing service, but will be about an hour of work here and there each week for the small railroad. We will make the railroad’s system available to the user railroad over the web, and make sure that the movements are reported in a timely manner.
Version 6 Deployment
The Adrian & Blissfield has been upgraded to Version 6, and the Southern RR Co of NJ will have theirs by the middle of June. We are still working on the rating database for the Housatonic, with anticipated completion sometime around the end of the month.
Well, that’s about all for now. We are talking with a number of companies about installations, and we may have an announcement or two by out next update.
Stay safe,
Steven Friedland President |
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