I have been building the FVRR Ops table while planning and trouble shooting operations before the actual construction.
It looks like my yard will be adequate but as just one person operating trains in sequence, Im already at 7 trains completed with 3 left to go. That means there is a total of 10 trains. That is just one “workday” represented so far.
Oiy! Look at the time! Is 10 trains too many?
How many trains are you fellas (And gals) running and how many people are you using to do it? One? 5? 10?
Take a look at my layout design analysis formulas … you can use them to determine all kinds of things about your layout design, including how many cars/trains you can expect to move in a session.
Of course, the corollary is if the number of cars moved doesn’t suit you, since you derived that number based on track plan features, you can alter your plan to allow for more cars to be moved.
This analysis is the most useful while you are still planning your layout since you can change lines on paper a lot easier than you can alter benchwork and trackwork if you would rather the numbers look different.
I believe the current schedule (four real hours) has 24 regularly scheduled trains, there are four yards, and the dispatcher. Of those 24 trains up to 6 are simultanious, so it takes a minimum of 11 people to operate. With 15 people it works much better because then a train crew is not finishing one train and immediately taking another out. More people also allow the dispatcher to have an assistant, and a “maintenace” person to fix little problems that crop up during a session.
Ten trains per trick (12 hours) is a LOT of trains. We’re talking major class yard heavy traffic type LOTS. With my prototype (NKP), Frankfort, Indiana was a major division point yard serving four divisions, and they barely handled 24 trains in any given day.
One major thing to consider are your yard crews. Will they have enough time to properly switch out cuts and assemble new trains? Will you have adequate parking spots to handle any peak times, or will you start seeing your mainline back up? In most op-oriented layouts I’ve seen, yard crews are hard pressed to assemble and dispatch four trains per switch crew, per three hour op session. Add passenger switching, LCL traffic, and local industries served by the yard crews (including engine fuel, ash, etc), and you start needing a lot more switch crews, and a lot more yard space to let them all work.
Yards themselves don’t have to be all that huge in order to handle lots of trains. You can easliy work with a ten train schedule with only a seven track yard. But the physical limitations of moving the cars around once they GET to the yard slows ops down significantly. We’re always worried about trains moving smoothly around the mainlines, but nothing will move after a while if the yard guys can’t perform.
A yard 60% full starts to feel “tight” and gets hard to switch
A yard 80% full is totally clogged and nearly unusable.
So the rough rule-of-thumb with yard design is figure out how many cars will be in it when it’s at its busiest. Then if you want that yard to be fluid, easy to use to make up and break down trains, then make the size of the yard double this max number of cars. [swg]
The bottom line is you need elbow room to switch a yard efficiently.
The Falls Valley Local is set at 15 cars outbound and will return with 15 cars loaded or empty. That is the morning train. Those industrys car capacities dont change. I hope. I guess I could take a few less cars or a few extra cars now and then. Those sidings are already accounted for to the max and am looking at the passing track for that town to hold leftovers if I have to.
According to one of my industries “VollKasten’s Warehouse” has 6 spots every day. 5 days a week. That will take 30 Boxcars in one week coming and going. (VollKasten is German for “Full Box” =) Rail cars on one side, trucks on the other.
I thought I would need three trains to handle the local switching but found I can get away with two by beefing locomotive power to the second train and adding work for it to do on the way back.
The most work I can do with the least amount of complete trains in a single “Workday”, the less stress it is on the yard.
Thanks everyone for your input, I suddenly have a weekend’s worth of reading material to digest and think about.
I find that solo operations calls for a reduction in the number of trains ran…For me I would settle for 1 local, 2 road freights and yard work…This keeps things simple and manageable but,yet gives the layout a busy look…
I would run a road freight while I am working the yard…Then run the local and then a second road freight as I work my yard reclassifying the first road freight and local into different trains…
Joe,I have had seen yards “wabashed” with cars at the beginning of operations at the club and still found room to build trains and even received trains…On the other hand I have seen melt downs in the yards where trains was stacked up in passing sidings waiting for a arrival track to open.What cause this melt down? Not chuck a block yard tracks but,caused by a inexperience yardmaster taking to long to build or break down trains and thusly he/she fell behind on his/her outbound trains so he/she could keep the yard fluid…
I have no doubt you’ve seen this at a club. It all depends on the size of the yard and the size of the trains.
For example, if you have a yard with ten tracks each able to hold 20 cars each and that yard is 80% full, then you still have 40 cars of space left. If a 12 car train comes your way, then it won’t be much of a problem to find room.
On the other hand, if you have a four track yard and each track holds 10 cars, 80% full means you have only have 8 cars of space left. If that same 12 car train comes at you, you’re sunk – no place to put it.
On the typical home layout, you’re going to have something more akin to the second example than the first.
If your train size is generally in line with the capacity of your yard tracks and like most model yards you only have a few tracks, 80% full will mean you can’t accept much more. [swg]
I run one train a week. It is a freight looking for a depot. Since there is no depot, the train runs around the big oval several times and gives up.[alien]
For us here at the Newman, Tuscola and Western (fictional prototype, towns are real) , we have 5 operators and 6 trains (2 yard jobs, 2 road frieghts,1 each of MoW and varnish). We have 2 yards, with the capacity of 35 cars each, plus a passing track at my location (my desk) and various spurs. We are operating RIGHT NOW, and 3 trains are running right now, with all operators present.
The yard jobs are making up trains, and the road frieght that has just left my passing track is headed for Newman, a yard.
We find that this and a combination of Cab Control and CTC works well for our system.
Joe,What you say has Merritt but…Speaking as a former brakeman there is nothing like making good time over the division and then cooling your heels waiting for a yard track to open.Now on a home layout why can’t a train cool its heels waiting for a yard track to open? After all we are trying to emulate railroad operations as realistically as possible and not just zip smoothly from yard to yard or from staging yard to staging staging yard…[:D][tup]
On the Roanoke & Western Railway we’re running 20 trains in a roughly 3 hour long session. If we have the wrong mix of green crew to old heads, it can take about a half hour longer. Not all of these trains do any work, but are simple run-through trains.
We slowly ramped-up the number of trains to this number over a number of sessions. Twenty trains might actually be too many, we’ll see later on when we go to a fast clock and have our train starts based on that more than on the current system of having them more orchestrated. Since our hidden staging doesn’t have the capacity we would like (That old 20/20 hindsight thing again.), we have to run things in a certain order, rather than as needed. We can’t start that eastbound train until that westbounder clears out of the staging to give the eastbound room. Fewer trains will give us some flexibility too.
We have three fixed positions, the Southern Division Dispatcher, Black Creek Junction/Clay Yard Operator and the Linwood Yardmaster. The BC/Clay Operator operates the Clay Switcher and runs the local panel in cooperation with the Dispatcher. The Linwood Yardmaster switches the yard and can also run the Thornton Local if he is able to. A good Yardmaster can do both, a little less experienced operator can’t. We need a minimum of 4 engineers, but 5 or 6 gives them time off between runs for food, drink and bathroom breaks. Plus, either Ray or I act as the Trainmaster and crew caller to get engineers away from the food, get trains rolling, answer any questions and to take care of any problems that may arise. Since I’m usually the Dispatcher, Ray gets the Trainmaster job.
So we need a minimum of 7 people to run, but 8-10 is better. We have had a maximum of (I think.) 11 or 12 - maybe more, but that starts to get crowded and things bog down because there gets to be too much talking by the off-duty engineers with the on-duty people.
Since we have a number of railroad employees in our operating cre
Maybe because it’s boring and clogs the aisles? And with Joe’s aisles, neither yard approach is a good place to have people standing around idly. For that matter, in order to take a siding and wait to go into the yard, the train would have to do it at least one town out - and I don’t think the siding in Sutherlin would be long enough for most trains!
Just checked the daiya (graphically depicted timetable) for my currently nameless end-of-the-railroad module, and discovered that there are 16 scheduled freights (of which 8 are mixed trains and 8 are unit coal trains) in a 24-scale-hour “day.” There are also 8 additional passenger movements covered by a double-ended 4-wheel diesel rail bus. Half originate, the other half terminate.
At present I operate sequentially, with one of those manually-set “back at” cardboard clocks to keep track of the scale time of day. The first train, 101D, is scheduled to depart for Tomikawa (actually into a cassette) at 0556 and is covered by that diesel car. The last train, 116D, ties up at 2128 - again, the diesel car, which usually spends the night sitting at the departure side of the passenger platform, out of the way of possible late-night freight switching.
Since I am a lone wolf, I can “stop the clock” at any point, even in the middle of a switching move. Running the entire schedule, with all switching and loco servicing as required, takes about four full-scale hours. With the temperature in the oven hovering around the 100+ level, I usually run two or three trains, then adjourn to the house.
Once construction on the main layout allows, the number of scheduled trains will grow into the dozens. Fortunately, most of them are through DMU trains, or EMU trains that terminate at their designated platform, then depart (with a new train number) from the same spot. There will still be plenty of interesting things going on - engine changes, through freights dropping blocks of shorts and picking up blocks of through cars, local freights originating and terminating, classification of arriving cars, switching local industries and the TTT interchange… I expect to need several real hours to complete each scale clock hour’s work when operating alone.
Jeff,I don’t see it as boring…I see it as real railroading in miniature.
Sadly thats the sad part of prototypical operations…Nobody wants to take that extra step in realism and stops at smooth flow operation…IMHO why bother to add prototypical in front of operation? Why not just call it “running my trains”?