The Cashaway Valley Railroad

With connections to the Norfolk & Western Railway

"On time and on track to the future"

Freebie Notes
CTC Panel

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     There are any number of tools available to draw a track plan as a background for the JMRI PanelPro application.  In fact you can draw your track plan using icons provided with the JMRI distribution pakage.   With JMRI, each track section, switch or crossover is an icon and your final plan is a result of adding these icons one at a time to the drawing.  I started that way and it does work but I wanted more open space on the screen.  There are some terrific examples of CTC screens built using the JMRI supplied icons at http://jmri.sourceforge.net/apps/PanelPro/Gallery.shtml

    Any drawing program that will export your drawing as a jpg, gif or bmp file will work to draw your background.  My wife does a lot of newsletters and graphics for her work so I used her tool,  Printmaster from Broderbund.

    Once you have your background loaded your ready to start adding signals and switch position indicators.  I strongly recommend that you download the Clinic by Dick Bronson from http://www.rr-cirkits.com/Clinics/Clinics.html

    Before you start the Clinic change your screen resolution to 640 X 480 or you will have a lot of difficulty reading the text.  The Clinic takes about an hour and a half and will save you weeks in learning how to place an activate icons on your CTC screen.