Economy-driven traffic lets RailCommand generate the freight demand for your operating sessions from a simulated economy instead of a hand-built waybill file. The economy generates prototype-plausible freight demand for your era and operating day; industries on your layout are anchored to economy shippers and consignees; the economy offers shipments, your layout auto-accepts what fits its capacity, and those accepted shipments become the realized car orders and switch-list work you operate. You spot and pull the cars, they are loaded and delivered, and the leg completes — closing the loop back to the economy.
You keep full control: the economy runs only when the demand engine is enabled, everything it proposes is visible before it is committed, and two owner dials tune how much and how long demand persists.
The Before / After Comparison
The comparison dashboard puts your imported traffic history (the JMRI OperationsPro schedule mix you brought in) beside the RailCommand-generated mix (the cars actually delivered under the economy). Grouped bars by commodity and car type, with a tolerance band, let you confirm the generated traffic matches the railroad you already run — this is the calibration acceptance moment and the migration sign-off.
From the comparison you can review the proposed industry anchors and confirm them in bulk.
The dashboard never invents data to fill a gap:
- When a comparison query fails, you see an explicit "couldn't load" error with a Retry button — never a blank or zero-filled chart. A failed load is called out as an error, not read as "no traffic yet," so you never sign off on numbers that were never computed.
- When there is genuinely no data — no imported history, or the demand engine has generated nothing yet — you see an honest empty state, and any side that has no numbers shows as "—" rather than a fabricated zero.
- When a before/after comparison renders, evidence that couldn't be classified is surfaced as a diagnostic cause beneath the chart: imported cars whose type has no era-valid profile are listed as unclassified and excluded, and malformed evidence rows are reported as skipped. These causes explain exactly why a before/after gap exists. When there is nothing left to compare — no classifiable history, or the layout declares no era — the honest empty state above applies instead. (Surfacing those same causes on the empty and history-only states is a tracked follow-up.)
The Offers View
The read-only offers section on a layout's detail page shows the economy's activity for that layout: pending offers awaiting the within-capacity auto-accept, accepted allocations that are your live commitment, and the closed history of declined, expired, fulfilled, and cancelled shipments. A capacity line (ceiling, backlog, remaining) explains why offers are or are not being taken.
A car that is still loaded past its demand window is flagged so you can resolve the stranded haul; an ordinary in-flight car is not flagged, so the signal is not buried in per-session noise.
The Owner Dials
The Traffic Profile on each layout carries the capacity ceiling (daily car capacity) plus two optional demand dials. Leave either blank to use the engine default:
- Aging Window (cycles) — how many economy cycles a demand item stays valid past its clock. The engine default is 3. Raising it lets offers, allocations, and orders live longer before the economy absorbs them; lowering it ages demand out sooner.
- Session Depth Factor (0-1) — how deep one session's order is cut from the capacity ceiling when there is no calibration history. The engine default is 0.6 (60% of the ceiling). Raise it for busier sessions, lower it for lighter ones.
A blank dial is byte-for-byte identical to the built-in default, so setting one only ever changes behavior deliberately.
Enabling the Economy
The economy is off by default. Production enablement requires the demand engine and demand realization to both be turned on for your environment; until then the surfaces above simply show honest empty states. Not-ready layouts continue to operate in free-run mode, and the comparison is meaningful only once a layout is calibrated and the economy is enabled.
Next Steps
- Introduction to Operations — what operating sessions are
- Car Cards & Waybills — the paperwork the economy fills in
- Open the economy overview at
/app/railcommand/gaming/economy.