Ross,
While your expectations are reasonable, they aren't quite right. In real railroading cars normally move with a purpose.? In our model railroad, cars move to create work for us.? It would take considerable effort on your part to guarantee that all cars in your classification yards would have a "Final Destination", or in other words, the cars move with a purpose like a real railroad.? It can be done, but in my opinion, not worth the effort.? Your not doing anything wrong, that's how the program works, cars are assigned to trains when built, given a destination, thus creating work for you or your operators.
The default loads of "E" and "L" tell the program to not route the cars.? So if you schedule is requesting either load, the cars will not be routed to that spur / schedule.? The only way a car would show up is when the program is looking for a destination for the car and finds that the spur / schedule is willing to accept it.? You can't remove those load names (L & E) from the cars, but you can ignore them completely by providing a schedule for every spur that doesn't use the L & E load names, and configuring staging to always place a custom load in the car when it leaves staging.? Note that custom loads can be a type "Load" or type "Empty".? So you can route "empty" cars if you want to.
There are two destination fields for a car, the next location a car is going to, which is given to the car when it is placed into a train.? That destination is simply called "Destination" in the program.? A car can also have a "Final Destination".? That's the field used to route a car. A final destination is given to the car out of staging if properly configured to do so, or from a schedule, and as you've stated, if the car has a Return When Empty address.? A schedule can optionally place a custom load in the car, and / or give the car a final destination.? Either one will cause the car to be routed.? The program when building a train finds a car with a custom load and no final destination, will search your spurs and staging, and if there's a match, will assign a final destination to the car.
Dan
