On April 30, 2012, Softrail announced that it would stop selling the simulation program “Train Dispatcher” and any associated territories with that.
TDP, as you may know, is a game that shows the diagram of the tracks of a particular territory, and your job is to route the trains to their proper destination as set per schedule.
Webrailroader’s CTC is our own version of the TDP. While it was certainly inspired by TDP, it is not a clone. The general task is the same – the routing of the trains according the schedule, but we put a different spin to it. For instance, you can communicate with the (virtual) engineers running the trains on you territory.
This project was started quite some time ago, just after TDP 2.0 was released. It has been dormant for a few years, but with Softrail’s announcement we decided to re-activate it, and upgrade it for public distribution.
The demo version is free. For a fee you register it as a standard version. Territories come in free or standard version. For a special fee you can also run a full version of a particular territory.
These fees are intended to offset some costs. The free versions therefore offer a sneak peak without any cost to you, while the paid versions will get you the full shebang.
In the next few days we will add more territories, and update the manual. If you find any problems with our software, please feel free to report them to us. If you want to submit your own territory, you can do that in form of TRK files or LAY files supported by the TDP software – we will adapt it to the CTC layout.
We will continue to upgrade our software, which, by the way, is of no additional cost for you – just download it, the registration code will still be good. The same goes for territories as well if needed for the general program update.
A forum will be opened for general discussion, but understand we will have restrictions to control spamming – we really don’t need that.
So please enjoy CTC, and let us know if you have any suggestions or ideas for improvements.