The Post With the Link and the Price
5 min read
Two weeks ago I wrote about a sheet of plywood — the figure-8 my father painted when I was four, and the fact that thirty-six years later the first app I'd ship turned out to be a track planner. I ended that post by saying there was a version of it that finishes with a link and a price, and that that post wasn't it. It was in App Review as I wrote it.
This is that version.
RailMind is on the App Store today. Version 1.0.0. If you have an iPad, you can download it right now.
What's actually there
It's an iPad app for planning Kato Unitrack layouts, in N and HO scale. You drag sectional pieces onto a canvas and connect them into a plan.
The one thing it does that I care about most is refuse. Pieces snap together only where real Unijoiners actually connect — at the real endpoints, at the real radii. If the app won't make a joint, it's because the track won't make it either. That sounds like a small thing. It's the whole thing. A sectional layout either closes or it doesn't, and the usual way to find out is to kneel on the floor with a box of track. RailMind moves that discovery to the screen. If it snaps here, it snaps on the plywood.
Everything else is built on top of that rule. The catalog is the real Kato catalog — straights, curves with their radii labeled, the turnouts, the crossings, and in N the double crossover and the electric turntable. If it's on the canvas, Kato makes it. When the plan is done, it prices out: every piece maps to a real part, the list buys in whole Kato packs the way you'd actually have to, and it hands you an estimated total to take to a shop. There's a close-the-loop feature for when a plan is one piece short of joining — it's plain geometry, not a guess, and it tells you the piece rather than deciding the layout for you. Inventory, a 3D view, twelve worked example layouts, undo. The ordinary furniture of a drafting tool.
It is a planner, not a simulator. No running trains, no throttle. It draws the plan; you build the railroad.
Why a tablet
Every track planner I found was a desktop program — a mouse, a keyboard, a chair pulled up to a desk. But the layout isn't at the desk. It's on the bench, on the floor, along the wall. I got tired of pointing and clicking at a screen in the other room to plan something that lived somewhere else.
I wanted to plan with it in front of me: standing at the table, or sitting on the couch with the iPad in my hands, moving pieces around by touch instead of dragging a cursor. That's the whole reason it's a tablet app and not another desktop one. It's iPad today, and an iPhone version is coming — so the planner is wherever you and the track are.
What it costs
You can build a starter layout for free — ten straights and curves, two turnouts, two special pieces per plan. The real snapping, the full catalog, the priced parts list, and all twelve examples work in the free tier. Nothing is watermarked and nothing is crippled; the free version is the whole app on a smaller layout.
If you want the full piece count, it's a one-time US$29.99. That's the entire transaction. No subscription. No ads. No trial that expires. It unlocks on every iPad signed in to your Apple Account, once, forever.
And two things it deliberately doesn't do, because they're the kind that get quietly added later: it collects no data of any kind, and there is no AI in it. It runs in airplane mode. The only time it touches the network is Apple's own — the App Store to restore your unlock, iCloud to back up your own plans so a reinstall gets them back. Every line of geometry in it comes from Kato's published dimensions and your own hands.
Where it started
I can't draw the line from the plywood to this any straighter than I could two weeks ago. A four-year-old watched his father make a world out of paint and a box of HO track, and thirty-some years later the same person shipped a tool for laying track that can't lie about whether the track fits. I'm not going to pretend I planned the shape of that.
But it's real now, and it's built, and it's the thing I said I'd rather tell you about than sell you.
Here's the link. RailMind on the App Store. Plan to the millimeter. Build to the plan.
RailMind is not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by Kato. Kato and Unitrack are trademarks of their respective owners.