|
|
|
Short Line Data Systems Inc ROCS Update - April 2006
Website: www.sdsrocs.com
Greetings:
Spring has sprung once again, and we have been springing up and down to Washington DC for most of the last month, both for business and pleasure, and now that April is upon us, our focus turns further south, to Orlando and the ASLRRA Annual Meeting and Exhibition April 23-25. We also have a new product to announce in this update, and a new customer. With all of this news to report, let’s get moving.
New Customer
We are pleased to announce that the Finger Lakes Railway has signed up with SDS to become the first outside user of ROCSDispatch. They will be using the NORAC version of the system, and we anticipate installing the system early in May. We are currently in discussions with a number of other railroads on ROCSDispatch, and we should have a couple of announcements of new users in the coming months.
Introducing PET ROCS
Necessity is the mother of invention, and necessity has led to the latest product offering from SDS. At the M&E’s Maine Eastern Railroad (MERR) we operate a passenger excursion service during the summer and fall, and after some attempts at automating our reservations and ticket management, SDS was convinced to write a ticketing system for the upcoming season. We have named the system the Passenger Excursion Ticketing Rail Operations and Customer Service system, or PET ROCS (our apologies to those having bad seventies flashbacks right now). The system will manage train consists, schedules, reservations, ticketing, revenue record keeping, will-call customers, point of sale tickets, passenger mileage recording, and the other features that a railroad needs to operate excursion or passenger service. Like all of the other members of the ROCS family, PET ROCS uses point and click screens and simple forms and reports to get the job done within the Access environment. PET ROCS also shares another common feature with the other members – low cost.
The current plan is to deploy PET ROCS at the MERR in mid-May, and it will be ready for outside distribution shortly thereafter. We will have some screen shots of the system up on the website in the next couple of days, and if anyone has any questions about the system, or would like to see what we have done so far in the development, please give us a call.
ASLRRA Orlando
As we mentioned above, the ASLRRA Annual meeting will take place on April 23-25 at the Marriott World Center in Orlando, Florida (information about the meeting is available on the ASLRRA website, www.aslrra.org). We will be in booth 410 in the exhibit hall, which is right at the center of it all. We will have full demonstrations of ROCS, ROCSMobile, and ROCSDispatch, and we will be previewing PET ROCS and ROCSFleet. Our new display is all packed and ready for shipping to Orlando, and we will have a selection of giveaways and information about our products (personally, I think the ducks are kind of cool). And don’t forget to drop your business card at our booth for our big giveaway prize, which, like last year, should tick and have something to do with a small amusement complex that is close to the hotel (and no, we are not talking about Sea World or Universal Studios).
Now while we are kind of biased towards the exhibition hall, there is an excellent educational program that has been planned for the meeting. There will be seven different tracks of presentations, with six presentations per track, so there should be a topic that everyone wants (or needs) to hear about. One other item that will take place at the meeting will be the end of my term on the ASLRRA’s Board of Directors, which has been an enjoyable and educational experience. RMI’s Pete Kleifgen will be ascending onto the Board, and Commonwealth Publishing’s Kathy Keeney will move into the senior representative position. I know that both will do a first rate job communicating the concerns of the Associate members of the ASLRRA to the Board and the Association staff, and serve as a conduit of information from those groups to the Associate members. It has truly been my pleasure to serve the Associates, and I wouldn’t be surprised that sometime in the future I will have this opportunity again.
Well, that’s all for now. We really do look forward to seeing all of you in Orlando, and until then, safe travels.
Stay safe,
Steven Friedland President |
Send mail to
webmaster@sdsrocs.com with
questions or comments about this web site.
|