A schedule in Traincontroller can be considered a "recipe" for moving a train from one location to another. It is programmed with the start and end location, the blocks to visit, the route to be taken to get there, and how the train is to be controlled (manually or automatically). When it is run, it reserves the track, sets the point positions and tracks the train progress. If it is controlling the train, it sets its speed. Schedules are the basis for automatic train operations on the South Downs Railway.
Schedules can be run by clicking on them in a list, or in response to button presses. One clever feature of traincontroller is the schedule can be executed by pressing a "start location" and "destination location" button, and traincontroller will find the sequence assigned to that pair of buttons. In this way, we have a simple switchboard that has buttons for each main track area where you can press these buttons to set of a train.
A slight downside is: we now have quite a lot of schedules, and we're starting to wonder if there are too many and if they can be rationalised. you can have schedule sequences, where a set of schedules will be run with one train: that might provide a way to break the basic set of schedules down to a simpler set of operations.