I just finished reading an article in Railway Age Magazine titled “can your yard talk to your main line” and it made me think about how to do this on our model railroad. The question is this, for those of you with dispatchers in seperate rooms or without a display of the railroad, how does your dispatcher handel this communication about arrivals and departures? Even if your dispatcher has a display does it include all yard activity? This seems even more of a problem if you are in an operating session and the yards are approaching capacity. I designed my layout to be a modern railroad with capacity constraints like the prototype. I have 2 classification yards planned on my multi level layout. One has 4 tracks and one has 6. If I have 2 outbound trains made up in the 4 track yard that only leaves me one track for inbound if I use the last one to make up the next train. This article I read made me wonder how other people handle this. Does your dispatcher handle or even know about the state of your yards? Does your yardmaster communicate directly with the dispatcher? It seems the busyer the railroad the more time consuming this would be. Any comments? HAPPY NEW YEAR, Joe A.
Most places I have operated the yardmaster has an intercom/radio/phone to the dispatcher. Really all the dispatcher needs to know is does the inbound train have a landing spot and when/which train will be out next. The dispatcher doesn’t need to know about “all yard activity”, just that which directly affects the main track.
Joe,
We use a timetable to schedule our train movements using a 6:1 Fast Clock. The dispatcher has a list of all the trains and what time they are supposed to leave/arrive, and that’s how he knows what’s supposed to tbe going on.
The yardmaster is the one that authorizes train movements from yards. In railroad management, yardmasters are equal to dispatchers in authority and responsibility. Dispatchers are in charge on the mainline, while the yardmasters are in charge in the yard. The Yard Limit is the borderline between their territories, with neither having authority over the other (or at least, that used to be the way it was, according to my New Haven Book of Rules and other old railroad documents).
On our layout, when a train leaves, the yardmaster calls the dispatcher and lets him know it left. The yardmaster also has a list of when trains leave and arrive, so they ought to know what’s going on.
Paul A. Cutler III
Weather Or No Go New Haven
on the prototype, it is basically a matter of cooperation between the yard master and dispatcher via telephone. even in the modern era when most freight trains are run as extras, things usually happen about the same time each day. the yard management tries to have the outbound train ready by a particular time and usually lets the dispatcher know when it will be ready. then, taking into account such things as crew and power being available, the dispatcher calls (“lists” if you are an IC type or “programs” in Pennsy-speak) the train for a particular time predicated on the information given him by the yard people.
inbound movements are pretty much a reverse of the above although you can say “it’ll be here when it gets here” the dispatcher will let the yardmaster know directly or through a block operator when to expect the train. that way he can be ready for it and take care of other work until it arrives.
in my younger days we had a new 1st trick relief yardmaster who was something of a squirrel although he wasn’t really a bad guy. a bunch of us 3rd trick types got together at a nearby tavern and took turns calling him on the phone (after we turned the juke box down) and reported deliveries enroute as if we were the connections. things like, “old Q here, i’m putting the air in about 30 cars for you, be there in about an hour. can you handle them?” naturally he would reply “come on with 'em” after a few of these calls he got all excited and called the dispatcher with something like. "i’ll have about a hundred cars for NY-8, let’s get him for 11:30!! around noon the power and crew showed up and the poor old yardmaster didn’t have 10 cars in the yard. it’s a wonder we didn’t all get fired.
grizlump
Paul, It seems that the yard is schedueled also. For some reason I didnt think of that. What if it takes longer to make up/break down a train than expected? Some will be longer than others, based on how many cars have arrived for that particular destination. I was looking at the yard as a seperate operation not related to the arrival of a schedueled train. Good thing Im in the planning stages.
Great story, grizlump!
Joe,
Yard work is based on time. You do all you can in the time allowed, and that’s it. For example, in the New Haven’s Freight Symbol Books and in their Package Freight Books (the public version), they listed a time at which loads were accepted for a certain train. Say you had a carload of fish to ship to New York from the Boston Fish Pier, and you want it there by such-and-such a time. The customer would look at the NH’s Symbol book, and determine what train would get it to their destination at the time they wanted. They would look at that train’s info in the book, and it lists a time up till when cars are accepted. If the shipper didn’t have the car ready to go in time for that train, it would get bumped to the next freight (whenever that was).
If the shipper didn’t care when it got there, they would tell the railroad the car was ready and the car would get picked up and shipped at the railroad’s convienience.
Paul A. Cutler III
Weather Or No Go New Haven
I dispatched for my club, yardmasters and all. We had pickup phones around the layout and a dispatcher phone button array. The dispatcher kinda played telehone operator also.He could cross connect phones so yardmasters could talk to each other, etc.
You could buy some cheapie CB radios and use that. I devised a magnet train system with cardboard markings and a taped up paper on metal dispatcher panel with the layout design on the paper, using the magnet markers to ID where trains will meet at, they had to report they arrived, and I could clear them on to the next meet.
The dispatcher had little to do in making trains, but like any road, theres a train design expectation so you know what may be coming but you had extras, peddle freights, etc.
The yardmaster has to know when he can send a train out when its clear and the dispatcher has to know if he can send in a train. Depending on layout design there may be arrival and departure yards between the main yards, so trains can bunch up there before moving on.
Most model layouts wont have this luxery. Usually like on the club layout I was on I would have to back up trains on passing sidings before the yard before the yard was clear ready to accept trains.
i never worked where we ever had much in the way of single “hot” car shipments. i guess things were a lot different in the early days. at E St Louis, most of our eastbound traffic came from connections, primarily the TRRA and A&S. closest thing we got to priority moves was the perishable blocks off the cotton belt and terminal railroad. these cars went on the head end of a selkirk and an enola train. piggy back or intermodal as it is now called was a rat race though. hottest move on the old NYC flexivan train was Kosher beef out of St. Joseph Mo. going to North Bergen NJ. 6:00 pm cut of time on those trailers and they went out on a 7:30 train. If one of those loads missed the train, the meat was in the hands of the gentiles too long and lost quite a bit of value since it would no longer be Kosher. after the PC merger, we ran a dedicated train for US mail and United Parcel Service. UPS paid a premium rate and rode with the mail trailers. best i remember if a load of mail came in before cut off time and still failed to make the train the railroad paid the govt. a $500.00 penalty and the trailer got a free ride on the next train. if a ups load missed they would raise hell and send a driver over with a road tractor and take it to destination via highway. I think ups only did this on short haul trailers like Columbus Oh. etc. The stuff going to the east coast just waited for the next day’s train. westbound priority was mostly auto parts for one of the three assembly plants in the St Louis area. they were all playing the just in time game and a missed connection could result in a plant shutdown. i do recall an occasional car coming down all by itself as a special train. (delay must have been the shipper’s fault) i thing the charges were something like 20 bucks a mile plus the regular tariff. nothing like the fresh fish moves you mentioned on the old New Haven but still enough to keep the dispatcher
The dispatcher “out ranks” the yardmaster.
The dispatcher is in charge of the main track, even in yard limits. The yardmaster can’t authorize anybody to occupy the main track in yard limits because every train already has authority (that’s the purpose of yard limits). The yardmaster can tell trains where and when to go but grants no authority. In steam days he had to have the main track clear for first class (and sometimes second class) trains because they would be coming down the main track at maximum speed.
While model railroads tend to consider the yard limit board as a stop signal that trains hold up at until the yardmaster lets them in, there is nothing in the yard limit rule in a real rule book that requires that. Actually just the opposite.
grizlump,
Yep, the old New Haven had several high priority freights back in the day (WWII and earlier were the haydays, of course, even tho’ there was still some real express action in the 1950’s).
There’s a chapter in a NH book called, “The New Haven Railroad: A Fond Look Back” that talks about “The Four Horsemen”. These four trains left Boston every night at half hour intervals: 5:00pm, 5:30pm, 6:00pm and 6:30pm, right in the middle of the evening rush hours. All four were strictly for closed cars (no hoppers or gons), and were run with almost military precision due to their importance. IIRC, they were: an all-reefer train called the “Cannonball” by the PR dept. but all the crews called it “The Fish” for obvious reasons, an all-LCL train called the “Speed Witch” that promised next-day morning deliveries to at least Baltimore, an all-car load train from Boston industries to the West, and the last train was an empties train that needed to get to Maybrook, NY before midnight or the NH would have to pay per diem. These four trains were vital to the NH’s bottom line, and any delays to these four trains would have to be explained by the Chief Dispatcher to the Superintendant. To make sure that would never happen, the Chief Dispatchers of each division would go and sit in with the various Dispatchers in Boston, Providence, New Haven, etc. and make sure they got over the road without delay. One former employee described it as like watching an invasion fleet move through one’s area.
These trains got the Four Horsemen label probably because of damage they would do to one’s career if one screwed up when they were on the board. [:)]
What’s sad is that there isn’t even one single freight today that runs between Boston and New York City. The freight service is handled by locals and partial trips down the Shoreline by P&W, CSX, NY&A, et al. </