You make several huge assumptions. 1. You assume all the rolling stock is for use on one layout. Much of my equipment is for special trains that I run on special occasions on special layouts. 2. You assume that all rolling stock is on the layout at one time. I have three sets of rolling stock for three different railroads that can take over the layout. That is there is a set for the Northwest United States (GN, CMSP&P, NP), a set for central Southwest (ATSF, SP, C&S), and a midwest set (CB&Q, MP, RI). So for the most part there is 3 times as much equipment as will even fit on the layout, and that doesn’t count different eras. 3. You assume that it matters how often a box car is moved during an operating session. I am no modeling industries I am modeling a railroad. It doesn’t matter to me if one train through a town spots a car and the next train through town moves or even picks up that car. The compressed action of the railroad is the important part. The operator of each train doesn’t know or care how long a given car has remained on-spot. On the other hand on industries that are large enough to have lots of cars I like to see cars stay around long enough that they aren’t always the first ones on the siding, but one has to sort out the needed cars from the back of a line.
On the other hand, I have envisioned an entire operating session based on industry input and output.
The industries on my layout are a lumberyard, a bakery, a quarry, two plastics manufacturers, and a team track. Therefore, I need centerbeams, boxcars, tank cars, covered hoppers, open hoppers, gondolas, and flatcars (well, just about all types of cars).
As of now, I have two centerbeams, two Airslide covered hoppers, a tank car, a boxcar, two gondolas, and two gravel hoppers. I need more of just about everything, along with some plastic pellet hoppers and a flatcar or two.
The bakery gets two hoppers and a tanker per day. Three sets of cars should suffice.
The lumberyard gets 1-2 cars (any combination of centerbeams and boxcars) per day. About four CB’s and four boxcars should be fine.
The plastics companies each get 3-4 cars per day. 15 cars will be needed.
The quarry gets one unit train (which will probably be limited to ten cars a day, due to the size of the layout) per day. In theory, ten cars should be enough (light power arrives, pulls the train to the major yard and brings empties back later that day).
The team track will have no set traffic levels or car types, so anything goes there.
This is enough to provide variation and fun on my small layout.
My layout has about 300 or so cars, acquired over many years. I decided on a prototype and era (WP in the late 70s -early 80s), and have accumulated cars appropriate for those parameters (including the prototype’s traffic patterns for both my local industries and through cars).
I haven’t worked out ratios by industry per se in most cases, but by industry SPOT (i.e. a given location within the industry for a specific car to be spotted). For each spot, I’ll have three or more cars circulating for a very active shipper, versus at most three for a less-often switched customer. Here are some industry examples:
My highest volume industry is a lumber mill that generates 15 or more loads a day, split between boxcars, flat cars (center beam and bulkhead cars mostly), plus chip racks (wood chip gons). Not just any old boxcar works out, as certain kinds would be preferred (50’ double door, or single door cars with large enough door openings to handle a fork truck plus the lumber it’s carrying, say 10’). Plus, the typical boxcar for such use would be a plain car with no loading devices (e.g. restraining anchors, bulkheads) and not one with insulation or a liner that would be easily damaged (not the same type of car you’d want to use for food or newsprint). Home road cars would be seen more often than foreign roads. I use a mixture of cars biased toward the WP, plus ince
Flashwave:
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?
You make several huge assumptions. 1. You assume all the rolling stock is for use on one layout. Much of my equipment is for special trains that I run on special occasions on special layouts. 2. You assume that all rolling stock is on the layout at one time. I have three sets of rolling stock for three different railroads that can take over the layout. That is there is a set for the Northwest United States (GN, CMSP&P, NP), a set for central Southwest (ATSF, SP, C&S), and a midwest set (CB&Q, MP, RI). So for the most part there is 3 times as much equipment as will even fit on the layout, and that doesn’t count different eras. 3. You assume that it matters how often a box car is moved during an operating session. I am no modeling industries I am modeling a railroad. It doesn’t matter to me if one train through a town spots a car and the next train through town moves or even picks up that car. The compressed action of the railroad is the important part. The operator of each train doesn’t know or care how long a given car has remained on-spot. On the other hand on industries that are large enough to have lots of cars I like to see cars stay around long enough that they aren’t always the first ones on the siding, but one has to sort out the needed cars from the back of a line.
On the other hand, I have envisioned an entire operating session based on industry input and output.</
Here’s the difference - with active staging, the same car can get used multiple times in a session rather than rotating off the layout. Say, it gets pulled from an industry, heads to staging, makes another trip across the layout to staging in a through train, then comes back headed to another industry. With traditional staging, the car is done after one of those trips, so additional cars would be needed to represent the other two movements in that example. One reason I use active staging is it reduces the need to acquire more cars and locos, thus controlling costs.
Since I decided to model the Rio Grande in the 1980’s (primarily) I bought books and have gone through many pictures to see what typical trains looked like. From that I have been using it as a basis for collecting rolling stock that matches cars I see.
For example Rio Grande ran:
-TOFC/COFC freights so I’ve built up a fleet of Trailer Train 89’ flat cars and trailers appriopriate to the time frame and photo’s.
-Coal trains: Rio Grande ran alot of coal trains so I’ve purposefully collected correct coal cars from Walthers 4-bay 100 Ton, Athearn RTR/MDC Thrall Gon’s, and 5-bay CSDU Rapid Discharge hoppers.
-General Merchandise Freights: I’ve observed the typical freight cars which are bridge route type (ie mostly offline road names) including lots of SP PC&F box cars, BN, and a mix of other common names.
-Since my era includes early double stacks, I’ve collect some typically seen 5-car sets including the Sea Land Twinstack sets, Gunderson 5-car sets and Maxi Stack sets.
-Don’t forget the Ford FAST, which included some auto racks (open, partially enclosed and enclosed) 50, 60 and 85’ boxcars.
Era specific photo’s are your friend and can help focus your hobby dollars on a theme rather than randomly buying trains just because they look kinda cool. Anyone can run whatever they like, but I found trying to copy the prototype make the hobby a lot more fun, and its cool to build trains that look like the real thing you see in photo’s or real life!
Rio Grande was a bridge route with very little online traffic but doesn’t mean you can’t model some sidings. Denver had industries and there were a few along the line such as division point Grand Junction had a pig ramp and a few industries also. I see a few others also suggested bridge routes too.
I use a computer program to create “demand”. This was balanced based on the industries on the layout and the size of the their spurs. Once I got the demand right – trains and yards weren’t being swamped with orders that could never be filled – I updated my rolling stock collection to fix shortcomings. The normal train length on my layout is 10 cars. As long as I can run all the trains at about 10 cars and the yards aren’t piled high with a backlog that never goes down, things are good. For awhile, I had a shortage of tank cars – too many orders going unfilled (bad pun, sorry) for lack of tankers to put them in. So I bought more tankers until the backlog disappeared.
As part of my operating system, I also have offboard suppliers and destinations, so I have some through traffic as well. I have a few drawers of rolling stock that I choose from when an off-board supplier ships something onto the layout; and on-layout rolling stock gets taken off the layout for a “day” or more when an on-layout commodity ships off-layout.
In my system, you rarely see the same car at the same industry and if you do, a lot of time has passed between visits.