I need some help with Car Cards and waybills.
Jay, could you be a little more specific about what kind of help? Actually there have been a couple of good discussions on this recently. I would suggest you do a search, but the forum’s search feature is pretty messed up lately. Let me see if I can find one or two.
The first one is really the one I was thinking of. The second one is about using a tab on car system instead of car cards and waybills. The third one focuses on the inventory aspect of car cards, but was interesting.
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=39015
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=38241
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=37845
I’m trying to figure out how to use them. I’ve got some already all figured out. I’m trying to everything preped before i get done with major construction of my layout
Look on www.micro-mark.com somewhere in there when you search for car cards there is a little instruction page you can read.
Many of us use a car card system based on the idea that Old Line Graphics (and also Micro*Mark) sell. Here’s a “quick ‘n’ dirty” on the basics, with some specific information on how we handle car cards and waybills on the Operations Road Show layout:
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Each car gets a card of its own. I use 3" x 5" cards.
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Each card is marked with the car type and reporting marks e.g. “C&NW 107416, Covered Hopper”. You can add other information, such as special loading restrictions, e.g. “Feed Grain Only”.
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Each card has a pocket of some sort for the waybill.The ones I make are a 2" square of acetate taped on three of its edges to the right-hand side of the card.
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The waybill card is usually much smaller than the car card. Our waybill cards are 3" high by 2" wide.
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On our waybills, there is a loaded movement on one side of the waybill card, and an empty movement on the reverse side.
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Each movement lists the car type (the same on both sides of the waybill card), the point where the car is starting, and the location where the car should end up. Those are the basics. On ours, I also include the description of the shipment (newsprint, coal, canned goods), a station code for sorting (this is specific to our layout), and a description of the routing. For example, such a routing might indicate that the car originated in Logansport, Ind. on the Wabash, was handed over to the Pennsylvania, and then is delivered by the New Haven to its destination in Groton, Conn. There is similar information on the reverse side for the empty movement.
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If you want to find the names and locations of some real-life industries and what they ship or receive, there is a HUGE list of railroads’ customers and the products they ship or receive on the Operations SIG web site at http://www.opsig.org.
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On our layout, the guys manning the fiddle ya
One of the best things you can do to support car card operation while you’re constructing your layout is to build and mount the car card pockets onto/into the fascia.
There are several different approaches. The way I prefer to lay out the card pockets goes like this:
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In yards, I like to have a separate pocket for each yard track. That makes it easier to keep the cards sorted so they corresponds to where the cars actually are sitting
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In smaller towns where there are only a few industries, I like to have one box for pickups, another for setouts/holds (holds being cars that aren’t going to move any time soon), and another for “off-spots”. You use the off-spot pocket for cards for cars that haven’t yet been spotted where they’re supposed to be (such as when there are too many cars for a particular customer’s siding), so that a later train can spot it correctly once there’s room to do it.
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For interchanges with other railroads, I like to have one pocket for cars bound for the other railroad, and one pocket for cars bound from the interchange to the main railroad being modeled.
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If a town has a BIG industry that sees a lot of cars, then it might make sense for that industry to have its own set of setout, pickup and offspot pockets, in addition to the ones for the rest of the industries in the town.
Based on the card design I showed above, I like the pockets to be 4" deep (for 5" cards), and 3.5" wide.
-Fritz Milhaupt
Web Guy, Operations Road Show
http://www.railsonwheels.com/ors
Come Operate With Us at Cinci Limited 2005!
There is a great chat group on Yahoo devoted to car cards.
Having been in a club, they used car cards with insertable waybills as described,
with a plasic visible insert.
Having been involved with the operations side of the club, I’ve tinkered around
doing away with the plastic sheet insert trying to figure out a stronger method of car routing. There were interchanges on the layout, and the possibility of the car taking several routes.
Cards that folded up from the bottom, with a smaller insertable 4 sided route card
was one possibility, each route was numbered and when delivered was advanced to the next highest number.
The route card only revealed the top info, when inserted, other info was hidden, and would be upside down in the car card.
The card system adds flavor to any run session because you can add various info to the car or waybill, it helps give more meaning to operation.