AEI Rail and Road Manager Express

AEI Rail and Road Manager Express is a visual software application that allows you to keep an exact inventory of heavy-weight rail vehicles, such as containers, freight wagons, and trailers, and allows you to draw your own rail schemas and yards to put your vehicles on, so that you can always know exactly where they are located.

This software tool turns out to be especially useful for governmental institutions and town councils for obvious reasons. Its main user interface is really simple, and it basically consists of a big area where you can design your track layout and add different kinds of vehicles. These you can locate over the rail, move from one place to another by using the drag and drop technique, or delete. Every kind of vehicle is shown using a different graphic representation and/or color. The program also allows you to create and maintain a Yard area, from and into where you can move your vehicles. You can save your work to disk at any time, for which this program uses two different types of files - one for the design, and another one for the cars stock and their location.

There is also a toolbar on the top side of the window that lets you see the file names (for both cars and layout) you are currently working on. There are also buttons to zoom in or out the current view, to justify the car location left or right (at the beginning or at the end of the tracks), to add new vehicles, to delete any of the existing ones, to find a specific car, and to see a complete or filtered list of the cars you previously added, with a wealth of detail. However, you can always return to your design view using the "Terminal" button.

This program is also a truly multi-user system, since it can be used by several people on different locations at the same time. All users may modify the current scenario, and all of them will see the changes in real time. But the program is also secure in this sense, as it keeps track of all the changes applied; together with the exact time and the identification of the user who did it (every user is password-protected). The program offers a number of additional related functions that make it a really comprehensive and interesting tool. The Express version of the program can be used for free, but allows you to manage up to 100 cars on your system. If you want to remove that limitation, you can buy the commercial version of it, whose price starts at $2,000!