Fuel, water & mileage

Log fills and miles, draw from bulk stock, and read the consumption figures they produce.

Fuel, water, and mileage are logged per locomotive and roll up into a fleet view. Together they answer what an engine costs to run, how far it can go on a tender or tank, and — because miles imply operation — which days count against its inspection clocks.

Logging a fill

Open the locomotive and use the fuel panel (the Log fuel / service day action in the header jumps straight to it). Each fill records:

Category — fuel or water.
Kind — coal, oil, diesel, or water.
Qty and Unit — how much went on, in whatever unit you buy it in (tons, gallons, pounds).
From store — optional. Pick a bulk stock and the fill is drawn out of it: the stock's on-hand quantity drops by the same amount and the cost per unit defaults to that stock's cost. Leave it on — none — for fuel bought directly for the run.
$/unit — the cost, used for the cost-per-mile figures.

Click Add. Fills can also be logged against an excursion, which does the same thing for every locomotive in that consist — see Excursions & runs.

Drawing from a store is how the coal pile and the locomotive stay in agreement. Set your bulk stocks up first in Consumable stores, then always pick the store when you fill from it.

Logging mileage by hand

Not every mile comes from a scheduled run. Use Manual miles on the locomotive page — a date and a mileage figure, then Add miles — for light engine moves, shop tests, switching, or to correct a figure that came in wrong from an excursion.

The locomotive shows both numbers separately, for example 124.0 mi total (98.0 run + 26.0 manual), so you can always see which miles were logged where.

There is also Log service day, for a day the locomotive was in service with no run and no miles to record. Enter the date and click Log day.

Excursion dates, manual mileage dates, and explicitly logged service days are all counted as service days, deduplicated per date — logging the same day two ways does not double-count it. This is what drives the service-day intervals on the Compliance dashboard.

Reading the figures

The consumables table on each locomotive shows, per consumable:

Added — total quantity logged.
Cost — total spent.
per mile — average consumption, total added divided by total miles.
cost/mi — the same for money.
est. range — how far the locomotive should go on a full load, calculated from the capacity you entered on its record divided by the average consumption. It stays blank until you have both a capacity and some usage history.

The fleet view

Click Fuel in the sidebar for the same breakdown across every locomotive at once, with each machine's total mileage split into run and manual miles. Use it to compare engines, to sanity-check a figure that looks wrong, or to put a cost-per-mile number in front of the board.

Fuel capacity, water capacity, and their units are set on the locomotive record itself — see Locomotives. Without them the consumption columns still work, but estimated range cannot be calculated.