Racks & rack types

The rack elevation

Opening a rack shows its elevation: a numbered U grid you place devices into. Each device occupies a contiguous span of rack units on the front (or rear) face. Racks can number bottom-up or top-down, and carry their own height, power budget and weight limit, all of which feed the roll-ups and design review.

You can drive the elevation entirely from the keyboard — J / K to step between devices, ↑ / ↓ to nudge a device a U at a time, [ / ] to resize it, and C / V to copy and paste an entire rack.

Rack types & templates

Rather than dimensioning every cabinet by hand, Railyard uses reusable rack types — a named template carrying height (in U), width and depth, power capacity and weight limit. Add a rack of a given type and it inherits those defaults; change the type and every rack built from it can follow. Rack types, pod patterns, the device catalogue and the naming scheme all live together in the project's library and settings.

The three view modes

The same elevation is read three ways, switched on the breadcrumb above the board. The mode changes what the board draws, not the underlying design:

• Physical — the clean elevation. Place, move and resize devices here.
• Power — overlays PDU rails and the power strip so you can plan feeds and watch load. See power & thermal.
• Cabling — overlays the cable runs so you can draw and trace links. See structured cabling. Within Cabling, a Logical sub-view collapses each circuit to a clean device-to-device link.

Esc steps back out of Power or Cabling to the plain Physical view.