Model Railroad "Inventory" Programs...

[mmagliaro]

I hate being a Google "suck-up" as much as the next guy, but a spreadsheet in Google Docs is a great idea.
Ha!  It never occurred to me.

And yes, it means I can look at it on phone (even though it's an ancient Blackberry), so if I'm at a train show,
and wondering if I already own a car, I can check.    (I just started creating one of these and then
seeing how it looked on my phone, if you hadn't already guessed that!).

Spreadsheets can be sorted by columns, searched, and even filtered (i.e. "Show me only my NP box cars")

Ed, you're a smart guy.  I don't care what they say about you.

[eric220]

I use a custom built FileMaker database. There's a FileMaker Mobile version, so you can take the database with you.





This is probably overkill for a lot of people, but I'm using this as the basis for setting up operations.

[peteski]

Hmm, where is the field for the purchase price? Many people use inventories such as that one to keep record of how much their collection is worth (for insurance purposes among other things).

[eric220]

I need to add that. Especially with my recent brass purchases.

[mmagliaro]

I like the idea of the picture being in there!
And I discovered you can do this with a Google Doc spreadsheet (you need to set a cell's formula to  =image("the URL of your image")
It works and it scales the images into the cells.  But you do have to bother to upload photos of all your rolling stock so they
are at a URL that you can link to, which takes a lot of work.

[John]

I use MiTrains .. www.shenware.com .. its not cheap - but good support and it interfaces nicely with my car cards program

[Scottl]

The Shen software products looks well thought out and efficient, and I can see the value of the exercise if you are going to use the data in waybills.  Otherwise, I can't imagine putting much effort into this beyond a spreadsheet (Excel, Numbers, GoogleDocs or whatever, they are all portable on mobile).