I agree fully about the ease, fun, and realisticality of car card and waybill operations! I’ve been using that system for ~3 years on my layout, and I’ve never even considered changing to a different system!
I’ve so far held two operating sessions, and the system worked great and is well liked by me and my operators. When I build my fascia (hopefully soon so I can resume ops sessions!), then I need to put in lots of bill boxes, labels for industries (right now I use temporary labels too), and sorting/storage shelves to set waybills and throttles down on.
Robby, I agree with Kevin that the system works with one person as well. I run my local by myself every so often, and I couldn’t run the job without car cards and waybills! It’s very relaxing to run out a single engine local and spend an hour or so puttering around on the main (without any other trains to get in the way) switching industries…especially when the momentum of the locomotive is way up around CV value 25, that really encourages you to take your time and enjoy the job!
Well what I do right now is just move some freight around (from one point to the next). I don’t use waybills, I just move what I feel like. Maybe waybills is the way to go.
My layout is currently under expansion, but I still have half of it working. I will have to read some websites, and see where I need to get started.
Lol… Ty, that reminds me of an ops session I had. One of my friends was running a little consolidated of mine on a local and I had forgotten to tell him the momentum was set pretty high. He came backing into a spur to drop off a car much faster than he should have, thinking he’d be able to stop on a dime. He took out the track bumper, a fence, proceeded on across the highway before stopping in a residential yard across the street. Yep, that momentum will make you take your time… [(-D], but I took it off the engines before some REAL damage took place.
Standing the cards by the cars becomes less desirable as the scenery becomes more mature. On one layout that I operate on that practice has been banned in the rules of operation. In the photo below notice the green strip over the control panel. It is a plastic tension strip that has a slot in the top were cards can be placed. Here in Gene Autry it is short, but in other towns the strip runs the entire length. That way the cards can be placed near the car without having to reach out over (and possibly destroying) the finished scenery.
I like the idea of pictures to help identify the car too. Problem was that I had invested in the Car Card system from Micro Mark. I had filled out the cards already:
I was photographing my rolling stock to use in a program I am writing so I printed the car’s picture and other card details on 2" X 4" Avery labels and stuck it to the back of the Car Card.
I also have a report with the picture too. Using this report as a reference may be easier than sticking a label on every card card.
Bob - not trying to be a smart-a**, but isn’t it unusual to have Bettendorf trucks on a diesel engine? Seriously, an equipment status and tracking list like that is a great idea.
The Bettendorf is the default when entering a new record. I honestly do not know what is correct or if the field should be blank. That is one of the reasons some of the fields are optional, and user maintained.
Thanks, the program is still in development. I am by no means an expert so I am trying to be flexible.
