A CAD that knows what a turnout is.
A purpose-built railway CAD for drawing and visualising fully equipped track plans, and for editing, checking and exporting object properties. It avoids the technicalities of a general-purpose CAD, and it prevents errors that a general-purpose CAD cannot see.
It is a correctness tool, not a drawing tool.
Smart topological constraints and automatic object connections minimise design errors during project modelling and review. A general-purpose CAD will happily let you draw a track plan that cannot exist, and the error surfaces three phases later.
It also automates the tedious and time-consuming production of consistent railway drawings and object attributes, which is where the hours actually go.
What you work with.
- Object browser with a preview of every library object
- Object inspector showing the attributes defined in the library
- Data manager, navigator and macro areas
- Cabinets and relay management
- Log viewer, autosave and recovery copies
Scale and domain data.
A station is the unit of work. A network is the unit of delivery.
Multi-station networks
Macro-level viewer, load and unload of macro areas, multi-file management for networks that do not fit one file or one engineer.
Paths and routes
Automatic identification with overlaps and flanks, feeding automatic management of the Table of Controls, with a Path Explorer for inspection.
Relay to cabinet I/O
Mapping by drag and drop, down to rack, board and pin.
Linear positioning
Linear positioning systems with consistency checks on the values.
Speed and gradients
Managed and visualised as first-class attributes of the layout.
Zones and areas
Including polygonal zones, for emergency and shunting areas.
Background import
A blueprint of an existing track plan as a background layer.
Validation
A schematic automatic validator, run before anything leaves the tool.
Print and export
Title block and print rectangles, PDF, SVG, CSV and image export.
railML, certified.
The railML 3.1 export interface has been certified by railML.org, and TrackPlanner CAD was the first tool to be certified. Import and export for 3.2 are under final verification.
The export is implemented as a plugin, through the same mechanism a customer uses to add their own.
NEAT / RAILML / CERTIFICATION