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 go to its Fuel & service tab (the Log fuel / service day link on the right of the page jumps straight to it).

For a fill from your own supply, pick the From store it came out of, enter the Quantity, set the Date, and click Add fill. The store decides what the fill is (coal, oil, diesel, or water), its unit, and its price, and the quantity comes off the store's on-hand stock in the same step. The form shows the store's price and how much it has on hand as you choose it.

For a fill bought elsewhere — a diesel top-up at a pump on the road, or water taken on at a foreign railroad — choose — not from a store —. The form then asks for the Consumable (coal, oil, diesel, or water), the Unit, and an optional $/unit, which you enter as paid.

Fills can also be logged against an excursion, drawn from a store for a locomotive in that run's consist — see Excursions & runs.

Drawing from a store is how the coal pile and the locomotive stay in agreement, and how the same coal is never priced two ways. Set your bulk stocks up first in Consumable stores, then always pick the store when you fill from it.

When a fill is refused

Nothing is saved, and a sentence beside the form says why, when:

the quantity is not a plain number above zero (type 1,500, not 1,500 gal);
the price is not a number (3.85 or $3.85 are fine);
the store holds something else — sand, say — rather than fuel or water;
the store does not have enough on hand. Record a purchase on the store first, or log the fill as not from a store.

Logging mileage by hand

Not every mile comes from a scheduled run. Use Manual miles on the locomotive's Fuel & service tab — a mileage figure and a date, 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 (98.0 run + 26.0 manual), so you can always see which miles were logged where. Run miles are miles per trip × trips, and only for runs that actually ran.

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 and unit:

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.

Quantities in different units are kept on separate rows — tons of coal and pounds of coal are never added together.

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 excursion 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.