I know Micro-Mark and others make Engine and Car Cards, Waybills and Bad Order pads, but does anyone make Train Order/Track Warrant pads available? jc5729 John Colley, Port Townsend, WA
No, but you can make those easy enough with either a word processing program (e.g. MS Word)or a spreadsheet (e.g MS Excel). You can find examples on the web, buy them on e-Bay or there are examples in the files of the Rwy-ops-industrial Yahoo Group.
Dave H.
Thanks, Dave, I could make individual multiple sheets on the PC, yes, I was just wondering if any were available bundled into pads. Maybe that is a bad description, I mean where you write on the top one then peel it off the glued stack? John
There aren’t any that I know of, but somebody might have made some for a club. I looked into making pads of carbonless paper for train orders (since they need multiple copies). But the onion skin paper used for train orders isn’t available to printers anymore except by special order, very little use for it any more. The paper available is the regular 15-20 pound paper. I never pursued it and the local printer that would do it went out of business a couple years ago.
Most of the people I know that use train orders use photocopied forms and carbon paper since they normally don’t have to make more than a couple copies of each order. another option would be to get a train order form stamp and buy pads of paper and stamp the form on each individual sheet. Didn’t say it was a good option.
Dave H.
I use both options for my train orders. Years ago, I had a train order stamp made up. I hadn’t used it for quite some time. I started using it again because a bottle of ink for a stamp is a lot cheaper than ink for a copier. I don’t use pads, I find it’s just as easy to line up multiple forms on a clip board or in a typewriter (remember those?) when multiple copies are needed.
Years ago, I used tissue wrapping paper, cut up in the proper size to replicate the onion skin.
Jeff
Anyone have a source for Form D’s? The only ones available on the web are cruddy looking, oft-copied NORAC forms with wavy lines and so on. Ideally, I’d like something a bit better looking. Nothing on ebay, and at the last train show at Liberty State Park in NJ (WAYYY before 9-11) none of the Conrail guys at their exhibit or NJ Transit people would part with even one unused one, let alone a pad of them, even though I saw a whole bunch of them there on their exhibit tables.
Its just a form. Make a copy in Word or Excel and print as many as you want. You can even print up a half dozen on a sheet and take a 100 sheets to Kinko or some place like that and have them cut them for a bout a $1 a cut (or less).
Dave H.
John,
I use track warrants on my RR also. At first I used some pads of real warrants supplied by some friends from the BNSF and UP. After several sessions, we looked through all of the warrants written and found that only 9 different lines were used. At that point, we made a condensed form with the nine lines and a safety slogan at the bottom. I have a master that I take to Kinko’s made on my computer. They even will cut them out for me! I don’t have them bound into pads. Instead I use the little 9" x 6" clipboards from Wally World or whatever. One other thing, if you do use a truncated form, use the real numbers for each line. The real railroaders have thanked me many times for this.
Happy Operations! Mike