Ken,
You are correct, for perishable loads, you shouldn't use the alternate track feature.? Instead you could have a yard track for the cars with perishable loads, and operate that yard in the FIFO flow, one of the options for a yard track.? The program when delivering a car with a custom load to a spur, and finds the spur full, will send the car to the nearest yard.? If the driver for cars is staging, the program will limit the number of cars with perishable loads to be created out of staging, thus preventing the overloading of the spur and the yard tracks.
The "Alternate track" feature works for any type of load including the defaults, where the "use a ;yard track when spur full" feature only works for custom loads.
The alternate track feature works best when there's a reasonable number of cars that could be used for the spur and alternate track.? So if you had room for say 3 cars on the alternate, and 1 for the spur, having 6 or possibly less cars servicing that industry could give the program to opportunity to pull cars off the alternate track instead of delivering new ones.
Dan
