Operations: Car Forwarding Question(s)

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

I use the car card/4 cycle waybill system to operation my N-Scale world. I had a question on how a local/switch job would decide this move (if I would be better to ask on the Ry-ops-industrialSIG@yahoogroups.com list I could, though they get pretty intense [:)] )

Let say that I have 2 cars delivered to my yard from a westbound and 1 from an eastbound train and I am in the process of classifying the cars for delivery to the plant, how would I decide which car is to be placed in which order for unloading or even loading depending on the requirement of the waybill? I am going to also add that both cars would arrive at roughly the same time to the yard, or at times both cars may have come from the same inbound train.

Thanks

2

Easy,The YARD crew would place all three cars in the train per the train make up switch list…The LOCAL crew will switch the cars per their switch list.Just as long as the 3 cars are together then they can be delivered to the industry…As a brakeman I was face with that problem several times…
Also if there is no room at the industry these cars could be held at the yard or a smaller outlaying yard…The industry would call their agent and request these inbound cars be held.However,some times the local crew finds this after they arrive at the industry…Then the inbound cars would be held at the nearest outlaying yard till needed.

3

Note that many industries have specific spotting requirements for different types of cars such as a box or covered hopper of incoming material, a tank of corn sugar or chemical, a flat of process equipment, and a higher quality box for loading finished product from a wharehouse, all on the same track! And more fun to throw you a curve, sometimes the tank will be connected to the plant for unloading, so it will have a blue flag and can’t be moved or even coupled to, so you can only switch whatever is on the clear side of it. Also sometimes a car will need to be re-spotted to complete loading or unloading. Enjoy!

4

Thanks guys! So the yardmaster or someone who would make up the switch list would decide the order of the cars going to a particular customer.

I did do an experiment last week were I didn’t use the car cards and waybills to operate, felt like I was just moving cars around, started to use the cards again and my layout felt like it had a purpose. I recommend to those that haven’t tried a car card and waybill setup to try it, it adds so much to the overall feel to the layout [:-,]