In operations what kind of matrix for loads/empties in and/or loads/empties out at industries served by your railroad? Do you provide daily service 7 days a week or just several or even one day a week?
The reason Im asking this question is the recent book “Industries along the Tracks II” provided a wonderful Brewey Matrix for car loadings in/out but I havent really seen this type of work done in too many other books except to say this product or that product.
I haven’t seen the book, but I imagine there are a lot of variables. Era is a biggy. Size of the inudstry is another.
However, if you are setting up for ops, just pick a schedule and go with it. If you have a bunch of guys over, they’re going to be too busy running trains to care if your load balance is off.
I have to rethink my locals, they have become frankentrains in my book.
Downsize your industries. Raw materials every three days instead of daily–or rotate them in. A tanker of Newman’s Own salad dressing one day. A refer of tomatoes the next. A refer of lettuce the next. Ship a salad on day 4.
Besides industries that generate mineral traffic (coal, ore, stone, sulphur, etc), probably the largest daily shipper would be a LARGE elevator/mill complex. Check out Chuck Hitchcock’s recent articles on his large elevator: it generates close to 200 cars in and out a day!
Mills, specifically those large elevators that do more than store grain, need a LOT of cars. If you’re talking about the 1940s you’ll need clean, empty boxcars for loading raw and finished grains, boxcars for bagged flours, boxcars in full of bags and supplies, and even hoppers to fuel the on-site power plant.
My new layout is (prototypically) going to have a mega-elevator right next to three railroads, forming a three way diamond and interchange. The IC works the plant, and had a day and night trick to handle the cars at the plant. The IC shipped out at least 100 loads a day from the plant on it’s own track, and handed 25 cars to the NKP and 20 cars to the Wabash, on average, daily. Double those numbers for empties coming into the plant, and that’s a LOT of cars. All this action takes place on a flat spot in the ground, in the middle of nowhere, in a city of less than 10,000.
I have a small Cold Storage which I can use as an example. There I have approx 16 dry loads and 8 perisables in a single day. I split this workload into two parts of a work day where the morning train will pull the empties and spot the loads and return to the yard and later in the day the afternoon train arrives with loads and pulls the empties.
To me there is enough empty cars going onto these two trains for return that I find myself considering assigning this cold storage industry as it’s own “Train” in my ops planning. I think that there will be about a minimum of 8 dry loads and 4 reefer loads going out on each of these two trains and have a equal number returning for icing, cleaning and reload elsewhere.
I did try a train that will handle all of this one industry’s needs at once and found myself adding big power to it and using alot of room on paper. Hence the name “Frankenlocal”
I think that there is an oppertunity to rotate product. I think it takes about a week to return a empty reefer for reload and a week to return. It is one thing to have a load of lemons come out of southern Arizona and another to have a load of Milk arriving every day or nearly so.