Hi all! I'm the developer of RailControl Pro, and happy to answer all your questions, discuss features and ideas here.

In a nutshell: RailControl Pro is an app which runs on iPhone, iPad and Mac. I'm trying to give a better user experience for Märklin Central Station 3 with this app, especially on mobile devices. There's still a lot to be done, and since I'm building this app alone in my spare time, unfortunately features grow pretty slow. I'd love to dedicate professional time on it too, but for that the sales are not strong enough yet 😜

EDIT: RailControl Pro now also lets you connect to Central Station 2. See post below.

I think the basis is solid though:
- Controlling locs:

- Controlling accessories through a keyboard like interface, or through the track diagram
- CS3 Start/Stop
- Shutting down/Rebooting CS3

Things I'm working on right now:
- A better speed slider (edit: done)
- Editing locs (stuck on an issue with writing to mfx decoders)
- Assigning a loc to a specific game controller, so one iPhone can control 1 loc, and all connected game controllers can control other locs (edit: done)

Things I want to add in the near future:
- Editing articles
- CS2 Track Diagrams (edit: done)
- Executing Events (edit: done)

The idea is that once all this core functionality is done, I focus more on deep platform integration: e.g. controlling locs from Apple Watch, integrate with Siri/Shortcuts (e.g. "Siri, start loc 186-902").
I don't want to create a new RocRail, but rather the app Märklin should have included with CS3. It should be easy to use, and self explanatory for new CS3 users.

All feedback, suggestions and questions welcome!

Website: www.railcontrol.pro ↗️


Some screenshots to give an idea, what we are talking about 😜

Edited by user 21 February 2024 10:28:44(UTC)  | Reason: Added info about CS2

Well it's super simpel:

- On iPhone there's a list with locs. You tap on a loc, and it opens the loc full screen. To select another loc, go back to the list and choose a new one.





- On iPad, this list is always visible on the left side (unless you want to hide it). Again you tap on a loc and the loc appears on the right side.



The app supports dynamic type, so if text and other things are too small on your screen, if you set the size bigger in iOS Settings, RailControl Pro will respect these settings.


For Articles, there are two options: 1) Track Diagram and 2) grid with all articles.

1) Here you can see the diagram, and if you want you can hide the left navigation to show the diagram full screen. The diagram is zoomable, btw. And you can show/hide the article names.





2) This is the grid: it will depend on your iPad, but with the navigation visible, you can already show 10 articles per row. So if you hide the navigation, it will be around 13 per row. So I think 100 might be possible on the biggest iPad. Again, you can make the text look bigger.




If you have more questions, let me know! Happy to help 😊

Your target audience is old gray men with presbyopia ("old man's vision"), so I think that your pictograms (icons) are far too small for the aging vision.

And these are your main customer !!

You have to think that it should be easy to find a locomotive without having to use the special glasses on an iPhone or iPad, and then quickly switch to seeing far!

I will try to take a few screenshots of the old app/version from Märklin.


Because you have to offer something that doesn't already exist !!!

Thanks for posting.

It looks like a well designed app with good documentation behind and the fact that your are keen to improve it will only make it better.

We definitely need some competition in this market which will only force Marklin to up their game as well.

Well done

Best Regards
Lasse

What does this do that my CS3 can not do. I have an ipad but why would I want to use it. The screen is a bit bigger but that is about all plus it takes up more room om my control desk.
I like driving trains and the CS3 events control the turnouts and routes and a shuttle line.

But if your CS3 is connected to your router, you already have this option with an iPhone or an Ipad, where you get the same options as a CS3 gives you!

I just suggest that the icons for the locomotives should have a more readable size ( so I have to figure out how to show pictures here !!! ).

Thanks Lasse!

I'm not sure how Märklin is actually interested in providing an app again. They retired their previous app and took the web-app route, which works on all platforms, but nowhere really well... It's the cheap option for them.

Sure, but try to use it for more than a few minutes, and let me know if you like it 😜

Thanks for the kind words, Marcus01! All feedback welcome 😊

Hello Northstar

I downloaded the Railcontrol pro app last week, and I have had a super time operating my layout using the app.
I am using CS2, and I have got a LAN connecting my CS2, iPad, iPhone, Laptop Computer, and of course my MS2 connected to the CS2.
It's really fantastic, and I shall be introducing this Railcontrol pro app to my friends with CS2.

My layout goes for 5.5m down the side garage wall, so this is handy to have a mobile controller when I am walking along the layout.
I also have two friends with very large layouts distributed over a large space, and this will be useful when I am operating there.

One suggestion which I would Marklin to consider for the CS (and then the Railcontrol pro would replicate) is to have a filter on locomotive selections.
For example, if I am running 6 locomotives today on my layout, I would like to have a filter for the active locomotives on the layout.
If tomorrow I choose to run a differerent set of locomotives, then I would like to change the filter for running the active locomotives.
Having a filter for active locomotives would make it so much easier for locomotive selection when operating a session.

Railcontrol pro has very useful filters for accessories (eg you can select light signals, or semaphore signals on the active keyboard)

I originally purchased the Marklin Main Station app, but my iPad had to be re-formatted at one time and I lost the app.
I am very disappointed that Marklin decided to discontinue the Marklin Main Station app.
But I am now delighted to have found Railcontrol pro.

Regards
John

And here's the next one: better loc management, ticking of #2 of my 2024 road map.

I just released version 3 of RailControl Pro, introducing a column view for locs and collections.

With column view (or list view on iPad/Mac), you can easily control multiple locs at the same time, while collections let you organise your locs in groups for faster access.

By default there's already a favorites and recents collection, but you can also create your own.

Other than that, by default, the start/stop button is now out of the way, living in the upper left corner. For the people who prefer it to be bigger and more up front, the old concept is still available in settings.

Read all about it on the blog: https://railcontrol.pro/...all-new-loc-control.html

A few screenshots to give you an impression. Feedback and questions welcome!


---


The new loc controls.

---


Managing a collection.

---


This all comes together really nicely when using more than one window.

Hi JohnjeanB,

Thank you for this very good question!

I started building this application out of frustration with that very CS3 web interface, and actually the CS3 interface as a whole. People pay a lot of money for a CS3, while in reality it is obsolete hardware running crap software. My vision for it, is that my app is the app Märklin should have built themselves.

Märklin is great at inventing and designing model trains, I love them. But they are not good *at all* at anything related to software, especially not the design. The accessibility and usability of their products is a nightmare and sub par of anything happening in consumer oriented software business. In my opinion that web app is plain horrible

By building my app, I also had to look under the hood of their software, and I can say that also the engineering part of the software is much below the standard as well. You can't imagine how many bugs are in there, or how much of their own documentation is plain wrong.

That being said, these are the main reasons why people buy (and keep) a subscription for my app:
1) They want a better experience to control their CS3 from their iPhone/iPad/Mac than what Märklin has to offer.
2) They are using a CS2 and don't have access to the web app.

I hope this explains my motivation and thinking behind this app. My goal is to have feature parity with the Märklin solution, so you can avoid their stuff as much as possible, and I'm slowly getting there.

Happy to answer any follow-up questions!

Here is my command station and the picture is reversed (don't know why), but it looks like it is for the southern hemisphere.

But press on the picture and it turns right!

My image only showed the page with the selection of locomotives, and the pictogram for the individual locomotives much better.

But the negative thing about the 2 old CS2 Apps is that all registered locomotives are included ( and here there are 40 )!

The speed is also recorded with a vertical slider and the movement is approx. 85% of the length of the IPad.

It should also be stated, that I normally do not follow / change the speed of a train from the time it leaves the platform until it stops via a brake module at an entrance signal to the next station, where I then choose which platform the locomotive must stop at (again with a brake module), and I can have up to 3 train sets on such a stretch!

It sounds bigger, than it is, because there are only two visible stations with double tracks, while there are also two shadow stations, and they are automatically assigned a track.

Hello all,

I use CS2.
My CS2 is connected to my router, and my laptop computer is also connected to the router.

I purchased Railcontrol Pro because I wanted to use an app for controlling my trains from my Ipad and Iphone,
but Marklin had removed the Marklin app from the app store.

I have to say that I am very pleased with the functionality of Railcontrol Pro.
I like the filter on the accessories.
And I especially like the new locomotive features for having favourites, where you can select locos to run in an operating session.

If I go to visit someone with a CS3+, then I still use Railcontrol Pro as my choice of web app.

Thank you
John