The popular one around here is “How many cars/locos do you own?” What I’d like to ask is HOW did you get to that number, abd no I don’t mean “Iwalked into my LHS lookign forpaint, and I walked out with 12 hoppers and forgot the paint”, I’d like to see what your cars/industry ratio is for the different industries on your layout. What proves to be enough for you so that you aren’t moving the same two boxcars, and what’s the split look like for high volume output industries like mines versus something that only puts out a car or two a day? I’m suire there’s a thread or thirty of these as well in the archives, but I couldn’t get the search to cooperate with me, so I ask anyway.
Simple really…I have a thing for boxcars so,I base my industries around boxcars…I also use cars like tank cars,covered hoppers,reefers and coil cars…The reason being empty or loaded they look the same unlike open cars.You can’t spot a loaded bulkhead flat on a team track and pickup it up later as a empty if the load is still on the car.The same applies for gons and flat cars so,when I buy these type of cars I buy removable loads…
As far as the ratios.
Industries requiring boxcars and covered hoppers dominate my switching layout.
Tank cars,gons,flat cars and coil cars goes to the transload track.
I usually have a meat distributoror or processor for reefers.
80% of the cars handled are boxcars.
If I like box cars, I model industries that use box cars. The same for tanks, gondolas, etc. etc.
All cars arrive on the layout via the interchange track. The number of cars inbound is determined by rolling dice. Each car has a file card, kept in a box and seperated by car type. I use waybills that are paper-clipped to the car card. I roll the dice, select that many waybills, and use the next car of each type to fill the bill. When the car is moved around the layout the card moves with it. When the car leaves the layout all cards go into a holding box.
I use an old calendar to mark off the days on the layout…schedules are different on Sundays, holidays etc. Before I begin the day on Sunday I sort out the ‘used’ cards from the holding box and put them back in the card file.
If, week after week, I find that I have more waybills for a certain car type, than I have cars, I need to buy more cars. If I find I have too many tank cars (for example) on the layout than I like to see, or that my industries can justify, then I reduce the number of waybills.
When I set the system up I made a list of industries, the car types they use and the number of each type, each week. The numbers were totally random, but reasonable, considering the size of the industry.
The system chooses the number of cars, the types, and the destinations, at random. I can control the overall number of cars by changing the number and size (6-side,or 8-sided dice)
There is no such thing as too many freight cars.
Good question and there has been chapters in a number of operations related books on this topic (example Bruce Chubb’s book). Here are the factors that are guiding my car mix.
Prototype modeled (1951 C&O)
RR design limits (spurs, yard capacity)
Focus (coal branch line)
Trains to be operated (mine turns, manifest, coal drag, mainline local)
Other RRs known to have interchanges with the prototype (B&O, WM, PRR, NYC, etc)
So…on the branchline that is the core of the RR, all 3 coal mines are being modeled (this includes the track layout the prototype used) plus a lumber spur. Car types going up and down the branch are:
hoppers
gon
box
flat
covered hopper
tank
Plus the mainline trains allows me to mix in a few other types such as a few reefers, auto box, etc.
The maximum number of cars (exclusive of planned offline storage) on the railroad is 202 cars if every track is filled to capacity. But that will never be done and the plan is a max of 100 ever on the railroad at any one time. Plus there is offline storage for 36 additional cars - this allows me to shuffles cars on and off as I needed to. This all helps me set the overall car count.
I also researched typical home/connecting road mixes for the period, and a car mix analysis from the prototype’s ORER reports. As example, around 1940 the basic mix was :
Box… 16.7%
Coke… < 1%
Flat… < 1%
Gon… 15.9%
Hopper… 63.8%
Covered Hopper… 2.5%
details by class/type were also developed. Finally, I set a rough mix guideline for the railroad like this:
Home road (C&O): 65%
Primary Connecting (B&O, WM): 20%
Secondary connecting (P
Era plays a role, as do the actual types of industries you’ve built - if half your industries require tank cars, then your distribution of tank cars will be higher than they otherwise would be averaged over the whole railroad.
Another factor is simply what the prototype ran, if you are modeling a specific road. Grab some photo-intensive books especialyl those with photos taken around your era, on the section of your road you are modeling. The Color Guide books are good for this as the shots often show a particular car class in a train with others.
One not so obvious example: I have as many B&O hopper cars as I do Reading. Why? Because I’m not modeling the Reading main line into the coal regions, I’m modeling more of the Crossline from Harrisburg to Allentown. Pictures abound of solid trains of B&O hoppers heading in from the WM connection at Lurgan to the Bethlehem Steel plant in Bethlehem. In fact this is what I usually run at our modular shows, although I make it a mixed train with B&O, WM, and NKP box cars and so forth rather than a unit coal train.
–Randy
Since the main revenue generator on my layout is a coal mine, I have quite a few coal hoppers. But, since my operation also includes railfanning trips, I have 3 separate passenger car trains. The small town I live in, Clinton, has 2 industries; fiberglass boat and cheese manufacturing. But, it’s also the last stop on the way to many recreational facilities; Truman Lake and Lake of the Ozarks, so people passing through find it interesting to spend the night and ride a train before heading on to their final destination.
I’m like Brakie, I love box cars. The two industries on my layout require box cars and hold 6 cars total. I’m using the dice system (blank die numbered, each on two sides) like Billy Dee, but for a maximum of 3 cars.
I mostly stick to my time period on the early 50’s. Boxcars were everywhere then. A lot of homes still heated with coal so every town could have a coal dealer or two which needs hoppers. I have added other types in smaller quantities.
While I know there are folks who have a master plan of exactly what they need and how many, I’m not one of them. I buy loosely based on my time period and prototype, but also what appeals to me. I have too many freight cars even if I do fill the basement with layout, but so what. This is a hobby have fun.
Enjoy
Paul
I’m trying to keep my car count to one month’s supply of cars (6 cars per week or 30 cars - for those 5th week cars.)
My layout has a high percentage of Swift reefers - I have a Swift & Co. packing house that requires 6 of those ‘red’ SRLX cars/day - it takes about 30 of those cars to operate the layout. I ‘think’ I have about 37 of them total. I also have a ‘zinc’ mine on the branch - there are lots of MILW & C&NW GS gondola’s, and 2 bay open hoppers for zinc loading.
The rest of the industries are the usual single car per week variety(fuel dist/feed mill/lumber yard/canning plant/etc…).
Jim
Asking me the whys and hows is dangerous. I am long winded. I hope not “hot aired.”
One major factor in my roster is that my major focus for 30 years has been modeling in in the middle 1950s in N scale. A for streamlined passenger-- but some heavyweights left. All diesel (diesels run more reliably in N scale than steam, per my prejudice), except possibly a preserved steamer on a movie run.
I am so Santa Fe-crazy I am not interested in running motive power for other trunkline railroads that “happens to be running across my railroad on trackage rights.” I don’t have yard or staging space to treat it realistically. One main railroad is enough.
But I do want to have some working interchange with shortlines or switching roads. My last layout, with an forest theme, had a logging shortline owned by the logging company.
Back when I decided to model what I model, I made a conscious decision to gather up 1/700th of the freight car roster of the Japan National Railways as of September, 1964 - and to give those cars numbers that I actually saw and recorded in my field notes (along with appropriate capy and lt wt data.) At the time, I had a source for most of the cars I decided I’d need at a price that I could afford. Then I noticed that I would be somewhat light in the kind of cars needed to haul logs from the forest railway transload - so I added a few (dozen) flat cars and long gondolas. As a result, the standard classes are well represented, while I’m a bit light on one-offs and oddballs.
Later I decided that my coal mining branch would be privately owned, since coal hoppers weren’t well represented in my roster. That led me to design and build (kitbash) several classes of hoppers of no acknowledged ancestry, the excuse being that the JNR was charging by the car to forward the coal from the interchange to the port at Minamijima.
As for operating scheme, most of my freight traffic runs through, from staging to staging - even cars which are dropped at the one yard I’ve modeled:
- Local comes out of staging, terminates. Of the dozen cars, one might be switched to the sawmill for loading. More usually, every car is either forwarded in the same direction by an originating local or switched into a through freight during engine change.
- Through freight stops to change engines. If it drops a cut of cars, it will pick up a cut of cars. It is just as likely to leave with the same cars it arrived with.
- Unit train of coal runs from the colliery to interchange to a tunnel portal leading to the netherworld - where it eventually finds its way back to the colliery as one side of a load/empty cycle. The empties vanish from the colliery and reappear at the portal of the parallel tunnel.
- There is a small amount of loose-car
I’ve amassed a fleet of over 200 PFE and private owner reefers to serve my 15 packing sheds, not all my sheds and packing houses are created equal, some can accomidate 10-20 cars and time, other single car lots. Customer preference is important, my prototype based shippers specified PFE cars and tended to avoid other operators.
My operations are loosely based on the 23 mile Ojai branch , actual SP car movement reports were used to to accertain loads and empties and any exceptions season to season , SP combined these numbers with those of the Santa Paula branch, since one local was assiged to both branches.
I don’t model the Santa Paula Branch so I reduced the fleet to what I feel is resonably accurate. Despite my parring down, I estimate my car count is short at least a hundred reefers! Except for wanting half a dozen PFE express reefers who’s appearence on the branch was rare but required for sensitive shipments i’m satisfied with my reefer fleet count.
Dave
Randy said “Era plays a role, as do the actual types of industries you’ve built - if half your industries require tank cars, then your distribution of tank cars will be higher than they otherwise would be averaged over the whole railroad.” And it did on my RR.
When I moved into HO, I came from another scale and didn’t have much HO equipment. I did have a few things that I had when running on the Club HO layout, so I basically started from scratch.
I didn’t start acquiring cars and locos until I figured out what my layout was gong to be, and what industries I was going to have.
My layout represents a division point that serves five towns and two interchanges, and the year is set at 1962. I decided that I could use three home road locos (Chesapeake & Atlantic). One for the eastbound run (GP-9), one for the westbound run (U25B), and a yard switcher (RS-3) that could be used for a road loco in a pinch. I had a Port that required a loco, so I found an Atlas S-2.
Then I decided that I was going to build an upper level with a couple of coal mines to deliver coal to the Port. The upper level was modeling the Western Maryland. So I acquired three locos for that. A BL-2, an RS-2, and a GE44 ton’er. The Port S-2 was painted for the WM also.
The car types were based on the industries and layout year. 40 foot cars were the norm, with a few 50 foot cars thrown in. The number of cars started off as two or three cars per industry loading door, of the type necessary for each industry. But when I started operations, I had to add more cars to keep things moving. There is a formula somewhere that says about how many cars your layout can handle based on the number of industries and length of you sidings and yard tracks. I used that to get to my optimum number of cars so things would flow well without grinding to a halt due to clogging the RR with too many cars. It is wor
One of the advantages of modeling through-traffic is that one doesn’t need to model a particular industry to justify particular cars. Off-layout “connections” also free one from having to model both the originating and destination industries.
What is the “dice system” that you are talking about?
My approach to hobby tries to be as realistic and as historically accurate as possible within the frame work that I have set up. My layout is a Freelance West Coast short line based on several prototype CA railroads. While some of the cars and equipment may have never run together, you won’t find many “fantasy” cars on the RR.
While I will use RTR and equipment that I have been given, I do enjoy building cars. I now have built and acquired far more cars than I can use in the operating scheme.
My operating scheme is basically to build trains of beat up cars in the valley to run into the woods up the hill and back, switching along the way. The layout is a double deck, point to point, ops based track plan with lots of staging (but probably still not enough).
The operating roster consists of maybe 50 cars that are used to go to and from the woods that won’t ever see the staging area and another 100 or more that do cycle on and off the visible layout via through trains that run to and from staging.
The layout is currently in construction mode, I have held only a couple of Ops sessions, so far. While my operating system is a little less constricted than the typical four position car cards, I have found that once the railroad goes into operations mode, the equipment traffic flow changes radically from the haphazard scattering of equipment that currently passes as status quo.
In Ops mode most of the cars disappear to staging leaving the roster described above. Currently the yard and sidings are serving more as train storage rather than their intended operational functions.
I chose the cars on my layout based on several guiding principles
- Cool cars that looked neat My definition of neat is mainly run down, odd ball, short line cars that were usually road specific and that rarely left the parent railroad. These cars are usually from the first half of the 20th centur
I agree with markpierce on what he said about through traffic. I have kind of followed that approach. I have mostly covered hoppers. I have a good number of tank cars in different capacities and a few box cars. I also have about 12 auto racks to make up an entire through train and intermodal cars.
Since I literally ran into & fell in love with the D&H reading about it in a magazine, I started thinking about modeling the “Bridgeline”. The D&H being in NY State, not too far from where I live in Canada, the sky’s the limit for industries both modeled & not-modeled knowing what “could be” there needing rail service.
Being a Bridgeline, an industry doesn’t need to be serviced by my railroad to be on my tracks.
I have auto rack & auto parts boxcars, covered hoppers for various industries, lots of boxcars, bulk end flats, flats, centerbeam cars, reefers, a varying assortment of specialty cars & of course intermodel’s.
One “business” I also plan on modeling is a Railroad Museum. This, in theory, allows me to have a various assortment of “older” equipment for use on my mainline as excursion trains. All kinds of rolling stock to buy for that. Locomotives too!
I usually don’t think how “will” that rolling stock piece work, but usually how “can” it work for me.
Gordon
Randy:
Era plays a role, as do the actual types of industries you’ve built - if half your industries require tank cars, then your distribution of tank cars will be higher than they otherwise would be averaged over the whole railroad.
Absolutely as does location.Even today some urban industrial branches are boxcar heavy while others may be tank car or covered hopper heavy so,research is another ingredient in unlocking the answers for the era and area we model.