About Cars

TrainPlayer offers a dozen standard railroad car types.  You can't add new types to the list, nor change the icons used to represent them, but you can customize other aspects such as the size, shape, and color.

Two of the car types are locomotives -- steam or diesel -- which makes them special in a couple of ways:

• A train containing one or more locomotives can move under its own power and be driven with the control panel.  A train without a locomotive doesn't respond to driving actions.
   
• A locomotive has a direction, and is displayed with a "nose" indicating which way it's pointing.  In a train with more than one, the engines do not all have to be pointing in the same direction.  For more on this, see Car Properties.

Cars can be copied and pasted from one layout to another.  Thus, one way to manage your car collection is to set it up permanently on a yard in some layout, then bring that up and use it as the source when populating another layout you want to operate.  Cars and trains are saved in layout files, along with the track and structures.  Once you've set up the cars you want on a layout, save the file and they'll be in the same places (and moving at the same speeds) the next time you open it.

Each car added to a layout is assigned an arbitrary unique ID, which doesn't change after the car is created.  You can change this ID to whatever you want.  By default, the ID begins with the initial of the car type, from the following list: