It doesn’t matter if trains just sit there because they are not generating any revenue anyway. My railroad is 100% subsidized by The United States of Me, and the losses are written off as entertainment expense. [;)]
Since I am operating alone every train except the current one I am running is stopped ‘in suspended animation’ so having trains stopped while the maintenance crew clears the tracks is no big deal. Sometimes they are working on a siding or on the main next to a siding so other trains can still go through but it just means that the meets will have to take place at a different siding.
When it is snowing in the mountains I try to run a flanger between trains. I run a spreader once a day, and run the rotary plows once or twice a year. It’s just part of the fun.
As for the daily routine, factories are pretty much the same thing every day but agriculture is very seasonal. During some months there is no traffic at all but when it’s harvest season then it’s super busy.
The “unpredictability” I referenced is, of course, still within the realm of plausibility. I was speaking of things like the regular load of paper to the printer being broken up by the less often load of ink, or a rare load of new machinery. Or the department store warehouse that receives a wide variety of loads, from appliances, to clothes, to books, to general merchandise, along with a small random chance for something like a box load of seasonal christmas decorations coming in for redistribution to local stores.
No, of course, I would not expect to send coil steel to the newspaper, nor fuel oil to the warehouse, but within the limits of reason, if you have some industries that are not so single purposed like the scrapyard is, it makes it just a little bit more fun and that was the bit of suprise I was referring to.
And as I have begun to install a GERN franchise, there is reason for another large variety of incoming and outgoing GERN products. In fact, about 3% more.
Yes, in many places in the real world industries can be mundane, but that does not mean I have to suffer with repetition to the point of boring myself to sleep on my own layout either, even if some of the places, like the coal mine, are the same thing, day in and day out.
Paul,Here’s another side of the story of XYZ beer factory that is overlooked by modelers.
XYZ can take a local up to a hour or more to switch depending on the required work and the number of cars and this will include spotting any previous off spot cars to the unloading area…
Not saying one is better than the other, and I can certainly understand your methods on your club layout, but when someone brings a new car to the layout don’t you have to now create and print a new car card? Isnt that basically the same thing as updating the (JMRI) program? I can see removal as maybe a bit easier if someone leaves with the car AND takes their card with them, but if they leave the card on the layout its pretty much the same amount of work as either deleting or putting a car “out of service” in JMRI to me.
On my “lone wolf”, one man small layout, I might just run and watch a train, or I might run a “local”, and do road switching on the industries I have, or I might just do switching and set-out, for the local, or the main line train.
On a train cam, I watched a through train, (CN) do some switching, as it dropped off a cut of covered hoppers, and a few center beam lumber loads, to the GLC, in Durand, MI.
Mike.
restorator,
If operational realism is important to you, then unpredictibility in loads or cars is just not that realisitc. Operational patterns change in glacier-like ways; months (or years) of no change, then wham!, something happens all at once when the factory closes (or opens), the crop is in (or out), or a bridge burns down somewhere. Surprise isn’t that regular.
That being said, there are still many things that one can do to surprise yourself on a model railroad. As an old school BattleTech player myself, I would make a 2d6 table for a pair of dice like this:
2 (3%) - “Snake eyes”; management is watching so work to rule.
3 (6%) - A car is Bad Ordered; set out on nearest R.I.P. track.
4 (8%) - Skill upgrade; flying switches and poling allowed.
5 (11%) - Handbrake doesn’t work; must chock wheels.
6 (14%) - Flat switching allowed; can “kick” cars using 0-5-0.
7 (17%) - Consignee requests a car move to another spot.
8 (14%) - Consignee not releasing X cars today (roll 1d6 for X).
9 (11%) - Cars have no air; wait 1 min/car when coupling to pump up.
10 (8%) - Old Brakeman; must stop each time to let him on/off train.
11 (6%) - Turnout is broken; no service to consignee today.
12 (3%) - “Boxcars”; Derailment of X cars (roll 1d6 for X).
So you roll a pair of 6-sided dice and apply the results in whatever way works for you. I literally just made up that table (the odds are the pecentages listed), so feel free to add your own. Heck, I’m sure Brakie here could come up with even more examples of stuff like this to make it interesting. Just remember that “7” is the most common number, and “2” and “12” are the most rare.
There’s a fine line between fun and work in our hobby; I try to keep it on the fun side, but the work side can appear all too easily.
Brakie,
Absolutely.&nb
I am developing a sort of deck based card system for the small town switching layout I’m building, to make it more of a game. Rather than separate car cards and waybills, I’m making cards for every car/industry/cargo combination I care to model, for two decks–west bound and east bound. A given card indicates a car, its lading, origin, and destination. Like your typical model railroad waybill it can rotate to its empty state (or from empty to loaded, as the case may be for the industry). Some cars may need to be spotted; others may be through cars meant for the next town.
To start a round, I’ll draw five cards from one deck to make up a train, and run it, dealing with cars already spotted as needed, and doing pickups for cars going that direction (spotted on the last round). Then I run one from the other direction deck, and so on as time and interest allows.
I also plan to include “event” cards in the decks, similar to those in Paul’s table, or for the possibility of other traffic, derailments or obstructions, extra through cars, or what have you.
To begin with I’ll be printing them out myself on adhesive stock and sticking them to playing cards. In the long run, when my layout and rolling stock is well established, I may have them professionally printed; there are a few options for getting custom card decks printed.
I do basically the same on my 4 x 6 1/2 layout. It’s a short line or branch Line. Capacity is about a dozen cars maximum. After I get tired of seeing the same cars roam the layout, I swap 'em out with a new set. Every so often I swap motive power. It’s nothing elaborate but I have a blast.
I only spend an average of an hour or two each week working on or playing with my trains. Some weeks I won’t even step into my train room.
In the past, on previous layouts, I have used Excel to generate a random switch list or freight train consist.
I’m perfectly happy being a “lone wolf” model railroader.
Alan
My road is a regional quasi-governmental that hosts:
- a for-profiit freight shortline, which connects on the east to a fictional fourth Conrail shared-use area, and to the east with NS
- regional commuter rail
- run-through Amtrak (Empire Service)
- Intermodal freights that exchange with my terminal and run through to the other side.
- We have just implemented transloading, intially of boxcars but later to have bulk, liquids and large loads.
So we have lots of varied operation.
The overal timing has scheduled regional commuter, Amtrak and intermodal trains. They’re scattered around the day so that they don’t confict. The local freight runs after the morning commute, then takes a siding at mid-day for a meet with one of the Amtrak trains.
Of these trains, only the local freight and its interchange roads use a car card (envelope, actually) and waybill. Waybills have 2 or more sides and you just advance to the next side on arrival. One of the sides may indicate layover. At the end, you start over at the first side. These are designed to have an ansynchronous pattern, that is, you should see different cars together on freight runs. The intermodal terminal has a deck of cards saying how many containers or trailers shall be removed or added for each run.
I think it might help if you ask yourself what you really want out of your layout. Do you want to simulate the experience of running a real railroad, being a real train crew member? Or do you want to simulate the experience of watching trains in another place and time? For my home layout, which I operate alone, I have decidedly come down on the side of being the watcher, and in fact the layout was designed to support this.
Essentially, it’s a short section of a busy single track mainline, with a couple of passing sidings for meets and one depot where the surviving passenger trains still stop. And to change it up a bit, I’ve got bits of two branch lines and several local industries. So there’s some slow-paced operations to balance out the mainline action. I’ve never used car cards or waybills. I have a bunch of trains made up and parked in staging, and I operate them according to a schedule that represents a day in the life of the railroad. The passenger trains are usually pretty predictable, arriving at least close to schedule, but the freights are more randomly variable, sometimes so much that the order is changed slightly. That way I don’t get exactly the same meets every day. When I’m lazy, things get spread out, and meets are few. If I’m feeling ambitious, maybe I’ll decide it’s been a bad dispatching day, and plug both sidings and then send two more trains out to work their way through. The ideas suggested above for gaming this aspect of the operation are pretty cool.
The local turns working the branchlines and industries are pretty repetitive, as described by other posters, but never identical. Daily, high-volume customers provide a baseload of work, (hoppers for the gravel quarry, boxcars for the grain elevators) but other customers are more sporadic and may only need to be worked once every few days. I only switch up and rebuild the through freight trains every month or two, once I’ve begun to memorize their consists (my fleet is somewhere between
This is a great thread and I have read most of your very interesting replies.
Thanks to restorator for starting it.
I am a solo operator and this thread encouraged me to document an operating schedule for my small layout (11’ X 6’).
I don’t use waybills or car cards (yet).
As I tried to get a working schedule, I realised that I have too many trains on my layout. By reducing the numer of trains I can now have an interesting schedule that is flexible enough that it doesn’t matter if I don’t complete a full session at one time. I can pick up where I left off or just run a train around to show visitors without messing up the schedule.
Now to try it out! I suspect I may have to reduce the amount of rollingstock (Cars) on the layout too.
Oh one piece of advice, you can never have too much staging even on a small layout.
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I have learned that lesson, you are correct.
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Over 1/3 of the space on my next layout will be dedicated for staging.
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-Kevin
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You are right about staging Kevin, and I was right about having too many cars on the layout. I ran the schedule I had planned. It worked very well except for the switching cars part, where i realised that all my switching tracks were a bit too full. So in addition to removing one whole train I also removed 2 tank cars, 3 box cars, two flat cars. a gondola and a caboose. I kept my special passenger train (Oscar and Piker) for the bigwigs to used for adhoc inspections, and I need to add a spur in the loco depot to store them.
Once again thanks to restorator for starting this thread.
Agree that you can never have too much staging. I have devoted fully half my layout space to staging. I have a two-level layout with helixes connecting at each end. The entire lower level is a double-ended staging yard; the upper level is the “stage” with scenery.
My lone wolf runnings on my old layout consisted of having a mainline train run around and around, while I focused on switching cars. The most fun comes when you try to figure out how to get the mainline train and the switcher to not collide or hog the right of way. Totally unrealistic, but…
My wish is to have more staging area but it will not happen in my current situation. In reality, I have too much stuff on my layout. I love long trains but finding a place to park them became my headache. To help, I wound up adding a lot more track. That helped but now my layout has more track that I would prefer. As a result, this situation has dictated my operating style.
I always have a continuous loop that I can run a long train on. It operates primarily in the background while I am busy running a local that shuttles cars to/from a yard and customers. So far I am not using any card list, JMRI or any other structured process to move cars. I do plan to integrate something structured into my operations as soon as I figure out what works best for me.
In the meantime, the long train operates on the mainline loop but is forced to stop as needed to accomodate the work by the local.
HI Folks; This is quite a timely thread for me as I am trying to get my operations plans in place. I am modeling the San Luis and Rio Grande, set in a slightly alternate universe where passenger is still in its glory days, BUT it is set in the modern day using modern equipment. The layout covers the area between Alamosa, and Walsenburg, with a connection to the BNSF in Gallup NM, and the UP in Walsenburg, as well it has branches to Creede CO (west of Alamosa) and Center Colorado. There are several Active coal mines, one of which is modeled on the railroad, as well as a number of real or fictional businesses. Walsenburg has staging off of it, as well as a few “cassette” type staging tracks in various other places. I want to run some sort of operations, without spending all my modeling time doing paperwork, and I REALLY want to avoid the same car orbiting the layout each time I operate. Likewise, I want to be able to “Pick it up and put it down” as I have time here and there. I enjoy computers, and I have developed an access app for generating waybills and car cards (similar to shipit) that I can use. I am NOT (I repeat NOT) interested in a stateful system, as that will take much more time than I am interested in spending. Also, I love the idea of being able to introduce some random elements into the mix (Fires, floods, derailments, Bad orders, empty car orders etc) I would really like some input into how to set it up and make it work Thanks TIM San Luis and Rio Grande