A while back, I purchased car cards and 4-cycle waybills from Micromark to initiate car forwarding operations on my layout. I’ve finished the waybills for each of my freight cars except for the piggyback cars that I have. I’m kind of stuck on how to handle them since each trailer is basically a separate shipment. Since I have more trailers than piggyback cars and don’t want to have the same trailer on each car all the time, does anybody have any recommendations on how I should incorporate this into the car card system that I’ve put into place?
From the standpoint of a CAR card you bill the railcar from ramp to ramp. The trailer isn’t really important. So the railcar might go from the ramp at LA to a ramp at Chicago. The trailers might go literally anywhere from a couple hundred mile radius of Chicago to anyplace east of Chicago.
The ramp loads the trailers based on their destination ramp, the car is billed based on the destination ramp, the railroad handles the car based on the desintaion ramp, the trailer is handled at the destination ramp based on the waybill of the trailer.
I detest piggyback operations, but if I were doing it I would have a waybill with the destination ramp on it. Then I would have a waybill for each trailer with just the trailer number on it. Only the piggyback cars would have car cards (not trailers). I would load the car with trailers, put the trailer’s waybill in the car card and then add a destination ramp waybill. I might even make the trailer waybills shorter and the destination waybills taller than them so I can read the destination ramp above the trailer numbers.
First, do you have a place on your layout where trailers can be loaded/unloaded?
If so, then each car gets a car card and each trailer gets a waybill, just like any other open-top load (big crate on a flat, pipe in a gon, construction machinery…) When the car arrives with a trailer to be unloaded, either an operating crane or The Great Hand Of God removes it from the car, which then becomes (and is handled as) an empty (look, Ma, no waybill.) If there is a trailer to be loaded, a sutable empty car will be spotted (directed by an ‘empty’ waybill if it isn’t there already) and the loading will take place. Note that these aren’t four-sided continuous-operation waybills, they are two-sided, and call for an empty to be loaded with a specific trailer or show that specific trailer aboard for delivery as directed.
OTOH, if there is no trailer-to-rails transfer point, then the car simply shuttles back and forth between staging yards and trailers are added/removed by fiddling them in staging. On my layout, open-top loads are handled in that manner - most of them are simply passing through.
For intermodal traffic, it’ll be basically bridge traffic on my layout since the only terminals for the connecting class I’s are in Chicago, Toledo, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Columbus. I like the idea of giving each trailer a waybill (could put the trailer ID in the Lading field and keep the waybill with the trailer) and then just putting the multiple waybills in the available car cards. For each waybill for each trailer, I can just put in a cycle to move the trailer around from point to point.
I’ve actually got something similar for my 40+ TripleCrown trailers. In that case, I’ve got a car card for each trailer since in that case each trailer is basically a car, and then the waybill on each car cycles through the routes.
I guess when it came to my piggyback cars, I was stuck on the mindset of one waybill per car card.
There is only one waybill per piggyback car. Especially if you are modeling the prior to the mid-1980’s (when packers and cranes became common).
The train moves the car, the crew won’t look at where the trailers are going, they will move the car where the cars are going. The only two people who do anything with the trailer waybill are the guy who loads the car and the guy who unloads the car. Everybody in the middle doesn’t really care. They take the trailers to wherever the car they are on goes. Depending on the era, all of those trailers Could be “Chicagos” becaue they would all be grounded at Chicago, drayed (rubber tire interchange) to the connecting carrier and they would reload the trailers on a new car on their railroad. If you have a mixed destination train its quicker to detrain, drive them and reload than to switch and steel wheel them to the connection.