I have watched the newest offering in the Dream Plan Build series which had as its one and only subject car card operations. I did think it was done very well but there were a few questions I still had after viewing the entire DVD.
One of the glareing omissions was the prior planning of the industries and yards, both real and imaginary. I have filled out the car cards and made the little pockets. The return when empty is blank on all of them. I just am not sure what to write…
Each pocket now has a blank four cycle card stuck in it. It would seem to me that I MUST know:
Yard names and direction,
Every actual industry that will be on the layout,
Every type of car that may be needed for each of these industries,
About the above cars will they be loaded (in or out) or empty (in or out).
In my case there must be an off layout connection to eight class 1 railroads. A friend of mine is building a rolling cart with multiple removable trays that I am planning to use to store these off layout cars until they are cycled back onto the layout
I want to plan this correctly, not have to rewrite the car cards, and to make my small railroad fun to run. I do hope I have explained myself clearly, in a way that you experts can aim me in the right direction.
BTW I have read every magazine article and special publications I could find. Including the many threads in this forum, one or two I started.
This is my layout plan, already built, but I can change the names
Yes, I did. Marked it as a favorite and visited all the links, printed most of them. I do understand the theory and the basics but it is the detail I need for my layout that I am missing…
If this is the problem for which you are seeking help, you may be over-thinking it. For cars leaving your visible layout, there is no need for a lot of specificity in the off-layout destination unless you think that would be fun. If that’s not the problem that you are trying to solve, maybe you can clarify.
But for that issue of interchange to mulitple railroads represented by off-layout staging:
It’s fairly unlikely that one railroad would connect with eight Class 1s in one location in the real world. So you’ve made the problem more complex for yourself there. It’s much more likely that a real railroad would connect directly to one or two other railroads in one location, which in turn would connect to the rest.
For the waybill cycle that leads the car off your layout, you can simply write the name of the railroad it is going to. Then the crew knows where to store it and where to switch it when the cassette for that off-layout railroad is “docked”. Then the next cycle is for a destination on your layout, which you know.
It’s fine to begin with just the destination on each waybill cycle, then add more detail later.
You typically don’t need to name every intermediate point on your layout that a car will pass though, such as a classification yard. Just the final destination.
But I am probably not understanding the question that you are asking. Sorry.
This is just saying pretty much the same as Byron and Dave, only using a slightly different way of presenting things.
This may be so self evident that it is unnecessary to say it, but I remember not totally grasping this point the first time I heard about waybills: a four cycle waybill really just represents four consecutive journeys for some RR car.
To create a given 4-way waybill, you only need to decide one thing: where (to what destinations) do you want the car that you eventually pick to be mated with this waybill to be routed first, second, third and fourth.The rest is for flavor, and is optional.
You could e.g. set up a very simple waybill that says:
Journey 1: From SAL xchange to Portsmouth Industries
Journey 2: From Portsmouth Industries to N&W xchange
Journey 3: From N&W xchange to Navy Ship Yard
Journey 4: From Navy Ship Yard to SAL xchange
For the routing of the car, it doesn’t really matter what kind of car (box, tank, flat etc) it is. But for flavor you can chose to say that this specific waybill will represent gondola loads, and write “gondola” for car type on the waybill. That will help you pick which car (and associated car card pocket) to use when you start on journey 1 for this waybill.
For the routing of the car, it doesn’t really matter whether that car is empty or loaded, and if loaded, what it is loaded with. But for flavor, you could e.g. decide to write cargo for journey 2 as “empty” and cargo for journey 4 as “Scrap metal”, if those loads seems sensible to you. You d
Don’t need that for anything really unless your yards are your interchange locations in which case they would be on the “VIA” line.
So do you have a problem with people sneaking in in the middle of the night and building industries on your layout without you knowing about it? Since I build the industries on my layout I pretty well know what industries are on it.
Well yeah.
The whole point of a car card system is to send cars to appropriate industries, so if you don’t know what cars the industries use, you can’t very well send the cars to them. If you just randomly send cars to industries then you really don’t need to do the work involved to set up car cards.
Actually you don’t really need that. You can set up an entire car card system and never say what is in the cars or whether they are loaded or not. You just concentrate on the movement of the cars. Many people include the commodity and whether it is loaded or empty just to add a sense of realism, also some people drive other things off that info (placement of the car in a train, tonnage, priority, etc)
Actually it may be unlikely but the original eight owners were:
Atlantic Coast Line,
Atlantic & Danville,
Chesapeake & Ohio,
New York, Philadelphia & Norfolk,
Norfolk & Southern,
Norfolk & Western Railway,
Seaboard Airline,
Southern.
The following railroads all had access to the Hampton Roads area:
CSX Transportation,
Chesapeake & Albermarle,
Commonwealth,
Eastern Shore,
Norfolk, Franklin & Danville,
Norfolk Southern Corp.,
Norfolk & Portsmouth Belt Line (the one I modeled),
Pennsylvania Railroad,
Virginian Railway.
I know that Norfolk Southern, the current 57% owner, is the result of the merger of these Hampton Roads lines: Norfolk, Franklin & Danville, (Atlantic & Danville), Norfolk Southern Corp., Norfolk & Western Railway, Virginian Railway and all the others not in this area,
So there were seventeen railroads going in and out of Hampton Roads, though not all at the same time but there were a bunch during the time period I am modeling. (1965 - 1975)
Every car that one railroad had to get to one of the others was moved by NPBL, formerly New York, Philadelphia & Norfolk.
I am sure I am not phrasing the question correctly. Products orginate both from the connecting lines and local industries. They must pass through at least one yard, maybe more than one.
To make this whole thing realistic I think I need to be close. The right yard connects to the right class 1, with both loaded and empty cars for the industries for that railroad. Only one railroad hauled engines for Ford, only one railroad hauled transmissions for Ford. They may or may not have
Sorry, I wasn’t clear. When I said it was unlikely that 8 railroads connected in “one location”, I meant a single physical location … like one cassette track. Belt line railroads like the N&PB, EJ&E and others might have connections with a lot of Class 1s, but it was usually in a variety of physical locations.
For example, in 1953 (according to the NMRA’s reprint of the Offficial Railway Equipment Register or ORER), the Norfolk and Portsmouth Belt Line Railroad Company connected to some Class 1s in two different locations in Portsmouth VA, and other Class 1s in at least three different locations in Norfolk.
You’ve compressed a fairly large belt line into a pretty small layout, so you’ll have to make some compromises in the way the traffic flows. But that’s OK, everybody makes compormises.
Another thing that confuses some folks is that they think the waybills have to describe every move the car makes, from an industry to one yard to another yard, etc. But in fact it can be much simpler than that (and was in real life) because there are other instructions that tell crews what to do with cars bound for specific locations.
I’m still not sure I understand your question, but I can suggest one way to make the waybills work on your layout, very similar to what I described in the other thread. I’ll write that up tonight or tomorrow and maybe that example will help clarify some things.
Edit: Actually Stein covered a lot of the general ideas … but I’ll see if I can add to that or to what others have written when I come back to this tomorrow.
First off, you might want to create an industry matrix like this:
Many moons ago, I used car cards with the movement steps listed on the back, the car would move one step each session:
Now I use a different system driven by industry scenerio cards and car cards. I don’t actually build the trains out of cars “stored” the yard, but rather use the 0-5-0 switcher to build the trains off of storage shelves. The car cards go to the industry slot on a board, and each one has a return to code when the industry releases it.
You were clear, my interpretation is the problem. The whole process is starting to make a little more sense thanks to you and the other guys. I look forward to any information you are able to give me when you have the time.
I have seen this term used a lot lately but do not know what it means. A simple definition for a simple mind please…
A cassette is a short piece of track (one car to several feet) that can “plug” into the layout. Most are shaped like a channel with the flanges pointing up, to cradle the cars. You have several cassettes, some have cars for the layout prestaged on them.
At an interchange, you plug in a cassette with cars on it. A train or engine pulls the cars off the cassette (cars coming from interchange) and then shoves other cars onto the cassette (cars going to interchange). The cassette is "unplugged’ and moved to a storage shelf. Another cassette can be plugged into the layout and more cars exchanged.
You probably should figure out what industries you want, what types of loads in and out they have, how many cars they can handle etc on an industry by industry basis before you set up a car card system.
Like Nick Brodar showed in his example.
Btw - some more eye candy/flavoring stuff with regards to routing and switching cars on your layout:
A car can arrive at a destination empty in one step and leave loaded in the next step, arrive loaded in one step and leave empty in the next step, or arrive loaded with one thing in one step and leave loaded with another thing in the next step. You decide what seems sensible for your industry.
For flavor, you can play games with how long cars take to load or unload - different unloading times for different types of cars, or unloading taking more than one turn/day/session, giving you a reason to pull one empty and one half empty car from an industry, then setting out one full inbound car at the innermost spot for that industry, before putting the half unloaded car back “on top of” (in front of) the full car.
Next turn, the car closest to the engine will be fully unloaded, the one that was innermost on the track will be half unloaded. Again giving you a hopefully interesting pull/spot/respot cycle for switching.
You can also do stuff like taking a deck of regular cards and pulling out one regular playing card for each car before you depart from a yard - if you get an ace, that car is “bad ordered” (needs repairs), and will have to be taken to a yard RIP track to be left there for one turn to be fixed before it can resume the step on it’s journey it was about to star
If you go through it in an organized fashion its not to bad.
I like to use a spreadsheet program. For each station list the industries.
For each industry list the commodities they recieve and ship.
For each commodity list what type of cars handle that commodity.
For each commodity list where it comes from (inbound) or where it goes (outbound)
Off layout commodities only need an interchange or staging yard connection. So your Ford Auto parts can go to/from “N&W” or “Ford Assembly Plant, Kansas City, Mo via N&W”.
I as said above my operations are driven by scenerio cards, one of Stein’s “flavors”. But these can easily be overlaied on top of the four waybill system…
All industries have a basic card, based on the information in the Industry Matrix:
This card makes up the majority of the industry’s deck. Inserted in the deck, however, are some speciality cards like this:
And it’s follow up:
After the special cycle is finished the basic card comes back up:
The Chief Clerk draws an industry card, draws car cards to satisfy the scenerio, and records the information on the Wheel Report for the crew. All the crew gets is the wheel report, the car cards never see the layout. When the work is done the Chief Clerk updates the location of the car cards on his board.
Nick, that is pretty cool and inventive method to add more operations. Using this idea is a good way to make a small layout like mine much more interesting to operate. Thanks for the suggestion and examples.
I also like scenario cards (also known as “traffic generators”) - where demand from the industries says what you deliver to or pick up from that industry - ie what kind of switching you will have to do at the industry.
But how do you handle car routing on your layout, Nick ? Do your trains always start from a single fixed spot (the interchange or the yard or some such place), take cars out to the industries, and then always return to the same fixed spot with the cars picked up ?
If all trains start at one location and terminate at the same location
If all trains start at one location and terminate at one location (which may not be the starting location).
If each individual train starts at one location and terminates at one location. (which may not be the starting location).
The prototype operates on #3. Each train schedule operates from a location to a location. The vast majority of them have different origin and destination stations. The majority of trains that start and end at the same location are yard engines or “zone” locals.
As it stands most routing is done by the “via” line on the waybill.
The way I handle car routing is to use “blocks”. Think of a block as a “zip code”. A block is a group of cars that will be handled together from one yard, interchange or industry to another yard, interchange or industry. They don’t all have to have the same destination, they will just be handled the same way. Each train carries certain blocks. Each waybill has the block that shipment will ride in on the waybill. You just switch the cars using the blocks and then put the right blocks on the right trains. I use a two part block code plus there is the destination information on the waybill.
For example, if I have a car loaded at the north end of my layout (Birdsboro) for an industry served by a local that runs out of the yard on the south end of my layout (Wilmington), then the block on the waybill will be Wilmington-L741. Out of Birdsboro it will be switched into a Wilming
Since I build the industries on my layout I pretty well know what industries are on it.
