Structured cabling

Model real structured cabling — not just lines between boxes.

Named ports

Cabling works at the port level, not the device level. Because a device type carries its real interfaces, you connect a specific named port on one device to a specific port on another. In the , drag from a device's right-edge connector to another device to make the link; Railyard knows the port's connector and speed on each end.

Media awareness

Every port and cable end carries a connector — RJ45, LC, SC, MPO, a DAC, or a pluggable cage such as SFP+, SFP28, QSFP+, QSFP28 or QSFP-DD — with its medium (copper, fibre, DAC) and nominal speed. Railyard uses this to catch mistakes: joining incompatible media (a fibre connector into a copper port) surfaces as a design finding rather than passing silently.

Patch panels, MPO breakouts & trunks

  • Patch panels pass a circuit through structured cabling: a device patches into a panel port, and the panel's rear links onward, just like the real plant.
  • MPO breakouts fan a multi-fibre trunk out to individual duplex links, so high-density fibre is modelled honestly.
  • Trunks bundle the runs between two panels; a “trunk-all” connects a whole panel to its counterpart in one action, and re-patching lets you move a circuit to a different port without redrawing it.

End-to-end circuit tracing

A single logical connection often crosses several patch panels and racks. Hover a cable and Railyard traces the whole circuit end-to-end, lighting every physical segment from the first device to the last — so you can see a run's real path, and spot a circuit that dead-ends in a panel because its far patch cord is missing.

The Logical view

Inside the Cabling mode, switch on the Logical sub-view to collapse each traced circuit down to a single device-to-device link. It hides the intermediate panels and trunks so you can read the fabric — what actually talks to what — without the physical plumbing in the way. Leaving Cabling mode drops the Logical overlay, so re-entering always starts on the plain physical-cable view.

The cable table

Everything you have wired is also available as a filterable cable table docked below the board — a schedule you can drive from the keyboard, revealing any run back on the board with Enter. The same data exports as a cable schedule and a label sheet; see .