I posted this question on 8-4-2006 and now having run the program and understand it I can comment.
1. BIG learning curve if you do not understand the real way trains are made up.
2. On a scale of 1 to 10 I give it an overall 7.
3. Problems for me at least. Making up a train using Autobuild it can not find cars in the same yard that are not on that track already.
4. Making up a special train from different yard tracks, can not do it.
The way this operates is that you enter ALL your towns, sidings with their length in FEET, all your engines and cars. You then make up routes to your cities with stops planned on that route. Next step is setting up the GAME BOARD, you locate all your cars and engines on the layout then tell Rail-ops where they are. If the car is not located on the layout the program will never find it.
The fool proof way to make this work APPEARS to be:
Break up the cars into classification tracks then build your train from that classification track. Once you have run that train Rail-ops keeps up with the location of the cars in the cities along the route. After the train has run it's route the dispatcher must terminate the train so Rail-ops knows where the cars are for the next train.
I DO NOT recommend this for a small layout with only a few cars and sidings. I am using it on a very large alyout to track 150+cars on 40 sidings with 2 major yards.
This is just a FYI if you have the program.