Lots of good information here,some perhaps going beyond what the original poster needs to get started, but all worthwhile.
For the layouts I’ve set up with car cards, we do a lot of what Nick is talkign about on the waybills themselves, indicating spot #s and such. It can certianly work either way, and some other ways,as well!
In our case, the information about what the crew is supposed to do with cars destined for various locations is in their train instructions, a simple separate document that is placed on clipboards the crew carries. These clipboards have a plastic pocket taped to them to hold the car cards.
One of the key things about car cards and waybills that I like is that one can start simply and add information and complexity over time. For instance, you can start with just destinations and maybe car contents for now, then add more infomation later (or never, as you choose).
I think one thing that might make it easier in your case is defining where cars bound for each connecting railroad should be destined. For some you already have tracks assigned, just assign the rest, too. The real-life railraod you are modeling seemed to use the same yard for multiple Class 1 connectiosn in some cases.
So if the desitnation on a waybill is “SAL”, you always know where that car should go next – no matter where it is sitting on the layout at the moment. This is why you don’t need to name every intermediate yard on the waybills. If a crew comes to an industry and sees a card destined for “SAL”, their train instructions tell them what to do. It may be to take that car to a yard (with another crew’s instructions tellign them to take it to the SAL interchange later). Or they may be the yard crew that handles the SAL interchange, in which case they take it to the designated interchange track.
In your case, the various Class 1 connections are the "s
Most real railroads do the same thing with every pull from industry, they take it back to the destination yard to be switched. If the industry job runs as a turn (returns to the same place it originated from) then it doesn’t matter where the cars go, they bring everything back to the yard. The car goes to New York, the car goes to the yard. The car goes to Los Angeles, the car goes to the yard. the car goes to the next town, the car goes to the yard. At the yard the cars can be sorted to many destinations quickly and put on the proper trains out of origin. Modelers tend to get real hung up on backhauling cars (the car goes east, but has to be hauled 20 miles west to a yard to be switched) but it is often cheaper to backhaul a car and put many cars on a train once than to not backhaul the car and have to stop a train multiple times to pick up smaller groups of cars.
So your system probably isn’t directly applicable (as is) for the original poster, who seems to be mostly concerned with routing cars (or blocks of cars) to this or that interchange point with other railroads, and not so much with local switching, as witnessed by the fact that he is concerned with sending engines one way and transmissions another way, but apparently has not named any of his local industries yet.
Still, it is a neat system, and similar to what I have been considering for my layout, which is also essentially a local industrial switching layout (ISL).
Yes, that is indeed exactly what I meant by writing “always returns to the same fixed spot” (on Nick’s layout, with Nick’s current operating scheme).
Reason why I was asked is that Nick’s scenario cards didn’t seem to say anything about where outbound cars pulled should be routed to (or, for that matter - from whence they came), while Nick had mentioned in passing something about integrating his scenario cards with 4-cycle waybills.
I was just curious about whether he actually had done the integration and if so, how he had done it.
But you make a good point about the fact that an outbound car picked up at an industry can have a default next routing point, and that default next routing point does not have to be the same as the last routing point the inbound cars were routed through.
[quote user=“dehusman”]
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 Wilmington block (along with Wilmington-PRR, Wilmington -B&O and Wilmington waybills). It will be picked up by a train that carries a Wilmington block. It will be set out at Wilmington. At Wilmington it will be classifed into the track for the L741 (Local #741). When the 741 local is built, they will use
Stein, you got it pretty much right on. My system is primarly concerned with the locals that sally forth from and then return Lampson Yard. It doesn’t care where the car came from before being spotted or where it’s going after being pulled. In fact it doesn’t matter if the car is loaded or empty.
Lampson itself doesn’t operate like a real class yard either. It’s more like a visible fiddle yard.
The use of my system with 4 cycle waybills and a “real” class yard, requires you to maintain a perpetual yard inventory. That way you know if you have 2, 4 or no cars for Brodar Woodcraft, and where they are. I oversee the real deal for a living, so maintaining the inventory for work and then doing it all over again at home, gives me the heebee geebees.
What Bob wants to do can easily be accomplished using the 4 cycle waybill. All he needs to do is put the interchange point on the VIA line, so the crew knows where to pick the car up from or deliver it to.
Or if Bob doesn’t care where the car came from or where it’s going,“off layout”, he could use one cycle of the waybill to route to car to and from the interchange point.
While they are in this case the same, Wilmington is a station, not a yard as far as the routing is concerned. That may be lost on the users, but in my mind the blocks aren’t necessarily a yard or a destination. For example a block on the old MoPac was “EMCH”, empty covered hopper. Any empty grain covered hopper on the south end of the railroad from any industry picked up the EMCH block. EMCH’s were routed to empty unit grain trains and run north. When they got north of Texas they were rebilled to their destination stations where they could be loaded.
So in that case the block was not a destination but car type and status.
I had another thought, if you do use an industry matrix. If certain industry pulls always go to the same interchange point, you should add that to the matrix.
Umm - while I understand that we should call things by their proper name (Wilmington Station, not Wilmington Yard), I am not sure I understood the functional difference between Wilmington being a station and Wilmington being a yard as far as routing is concerned ?
Do you just mean that Wilmington Station is not a waybill line destination? But then your yards probably aren’t waybill line destinations either (except possibly for empty cars, if you keep a pool of empty cars at some yard).
Or did you mean something else ?
So what I think you are saying is that a block is really just a group label.
It says "For this journey this car belongs to group X - if you have instructions for how to handle group X, you follow those first. When the car gets to the point at which group X special
Just out of curiousity, why does a model RR operator have to know what’s supposed to be in the cars? Can’t they operate with say “N&W auto parts car #xxxxxx to Ford plant, track 3” or “N&W auto parts car #xxxxxx to West staging”?
I realize I picked a bad example because it’s sort of obvious what kind of products are going to be in an auto parts car, but for instance if a pair of box cars are to be set out at a freight house would it really matter to an operator if one car is full of dry goods and the other merchandise?
He doesn’t necessarily need to know content of car (or whether car is empty or loaded) to route the car to the right industry. As is explained in several of the posts earlier in this thread.
For flavor, it would be possible (if desired by the persons running the layout) to have switching instructions for an industry or area that says things like “cars containing engines can only be spotted at door 4” and “cars containing transmissions can be spotted at either door 2 or 3”, or whatever else you want for added flavor while switching.
Linda Sand has an interesting article on this thing (spots within industries) in the article “Big Industries in Small Spaces” on page 66 of Model Railroad Planning 1999.
She e.g. has a Meat Packing plant with five short stub ended tracks tucked into a corner, where she designates different parts of the tracks as the place to spot cars for:
receiving reefers (2 spots, rest has room for one car at each spot)
You don’t unless you differenciate spots or switching or placement in train by commodity.
There is a boxcar going to Ft. Mifflin, PA (right next to the Phila. Int’l Airport. It is right behind your engine. Is that OK?
There is a tank car going to Gulf Oil that is next to a covered hopper going to John’s Farm Supply that is next to a boxcar going to Ralph’s Oil Well service that is next to a car going to Eastman Kodak. Is that OK.
All of the above is OK if you don’t care about placement or spots. If you do then commodity matters.
Like I said, my system doesn’t care what’s in the car or whether it’s loaded or not. All I care about are the switching instructions listed on the wheel report. Tab-on-car (which I have also used), and it’s various incarnations, is another system that doesn’t care about a car’s load or empty status, only the route the car is suppose to take.
Of course, when you want to handle specific commodities at specific spots, then yes you need to know if the car is loaded or empty and what’s in it. And if follow place in train regulations, you’ll have to know what’s in the cars too.
There are also some quite interesting discussions of car spotting (and re-spotting) in the produce district on the bottom of the page for Plymouth Industrial Railroad (http://www.sandsys.org/modelrr/modelbuilt/pi/).
Linda also has quite a few other cool things on her web site - like e.g. her prototype small town track diagrams - can be found under http://www.sandsys.org/modelrr/prototype/
Personally, I find it more interesting to think about the actual products that would be delivered and picked up, rather than merely shuffling generic wheeled plastic boxes equipped with couplers. [:)]
And as Dave H. noted, when you want to add some more realism, complexity and interest, spotting cars based on commodities and blocking them in trains based on hazardous material and other rules can be a fun challenge.
But I think it’s also important to remember that a lot of what has come up in this thread is “icing on the cake”. One can get started very easily and add these elements over time. That reduces the MTTF (Mean Time to Fun).
So back to the original poster: are things becoming clearer? Or are there new questions you would like folks to try to address?
And as I mentioned earlier, if there is any way a newcomer can find to experience an operating session (or a few) at someone else’s layout that has been operating for a while, a lot of this becomes much clearer very quickly. It’s very straightforward in actual use, sometimes much harder in the abstract.
Well after all the discussion I sat down and really looked at what I was aiming for. 2 out of the 3 industries I plan on having will need to know what’s in the cars. One industry will be a smaller ethanol plant (around 50 million gal/year) with it’s 5 cars of 30 000 gallons of ethanol produced every day (empties in, loads out), the 8-9 loads of corn in the covered hoppers a day (loads in, empties out), once in a while a tank full of gas (loads in, empties out), and of corse covered hopper loads of DDGS (empties in, loads out) that would get a few each day. The other industry is a feed mill which gets in tanks of corn syrup (loads in, empties out), and covered hoppers of grain (loads in, empties out) which can be of different grains for the feed. Just as a side note the DDGS, as explained in Walthers description of an ethanol plant, can also be used in animal feed production so I may skip a little bit there and have some modeled truck traffic. I’ve also planned on having the feed mill bag it’s product, so I can also add loads in/empties out of bags and empties in/loads out of bagged feed, not to mention other possible rail service to get the extra nutriants for the feed.
Heck I may just forget about that 3rd industry, I’m starting to think I honestly don’t need it.
Thanks for your concern regarding my original question. I think I am getting a clearer picture of what is needed to be done I the order it needs to be done.
I need to have the industries named, and an idea of the yards and other destinations.
The type of cars that serve the industries I am going to model.
Decide how to handle the interchange traffic.
There were so many great responses of which I printed many, if not all, and will have to reread them in conjunction with the articles and books I have on the subject.
Not at this time, I need to get a better grasp of the information contained in this thread.
That is very true. I think that some of the publications and MR assume a knowledge of railroads and the jargon of the reader. Maybe some readers but not all. When I write the help files and manuals for the programs I publish, I always assume the user knows little more than turning on a computer and starting the program. (I quickly learned that I had to have a shortcut to start the program because most users have no idea what the Start button is for.) Didn’t mean to get off topic. Sorry.
