I’m using the standard 4 cycle waybills that have been around for quite some time and something occurred to me that I’m not sure about. Lets assume you have enough industries on your layout that you can move a car from one industry to another according to the cycle on the waybill. If the first cycle directs you to move the car to an industry to unload, should the second cycle instruct you to move the car to the yard (theoretically for perhaps cleaning and inspection) before you would move it to another industry? I know other people use the cards and waybills. How do you handle it?
There are so many ways to vary the cards, I couldn’t begin to explain and list them all. However, I will give a couple of examples in the way I use them. My Santa Fe in Oklahoma is a grain mover first, and primarily. There are a total of 31 grain elevators (most are large ones) on my layout, so obviously the card waybills don’t begin to cover.
I will talk about one example that is heavily used. My largest grain elevators are owned by (UNION EQUITY), which was sold/merged into FARMLAND during the era I am modeling. A large number of my covered hopper (grain cars) are assigned to that service. So each car card for those cars contains a large letter F standing for Farmland, meaning we route them empty back to a Farmland elevator when empty for loading. When the session begins, the car router has already had waybill cards which indicate an elevator/city, and empty or load, and the cars are sent to those locations. When loaded, they will mostly be sent to Texas over the Oklahoma Div. main and the bill will simply say Gulf for Export or Gulf for storage. That means they are loaded and moving to one of those locations. There can also be routing cards to send the cars empty into the grain loading areas in Texas, Ks and OK, and the waybill card makes the designation. It is a simplistic way of handling the largest customer on the layout. If the cars are moving without any billing, then the black F indicates, as I said to a Farmland facility.
That is just one of several examples of how we use the waybill cars. I have other grain cars with a car card with a black letter G, which means grain loading at whatever point they might be needed.
So use your imagination. I worked 4 summers for Santa Fe in late 1950’s as a car clerk at Enid Ok during the summer while going to college (my dad was Santa Fe) and I got to experience how it all moved first hand. Today it is done differently, but for my era, wheel reports, wa
As Bob, mentioned - there are a lot of possibilities. For example. my Swift(SRLX) meat reefers are carded as follows:
Route to Company Ice Dock for cleanout/loading ice in bunkers
Route to Swift - place on the ‘pre-cool’ track
Move car to the meat loading dock
Route car to the Consignee(where the load of swinging beef will go)
Now the waybill is pulled from the car card and the car is again a ‘perspective empty’. On the car card under the waybill area is special instructions to route this empty car to the MILW Yard in Sinsinawa, WI - and the cycle can start over…
Thanks for the information. I suppose in the “real world” a boxcar that has been unloaded would normally be moved back to the yard before it is delivered to another customer for loading. Actually, I should have a better idea about this. Back in the 70’s I worked for a company that received boxcars for loading and my job was to open them up and prep them for loading. At least half the time they were full of trash from the last load. One 40 footer had been used to deliver grain or hops and still had about a 6 inch layer of grain covering the entire floor, (along with the rats that were feeding on it) what a night that was!!!
It seems to me that to properly use waybills one would have to have had a railroad background or done an great deal of study to use waybills. When I read posts like these I wonder if I should be in the MR hobby. I am content to set up my layout with buildings to simulate a small town with certain businesses, some of which are near the track sidings, e.g., stockyard, fuel and oil storage tanks, loco water tanks and coaling tower, grain elevator and lumber yard, and further to just simply run my trains without waybills, etc. Am I missing something?
Not at all. There are many modelers who don’t have a railroad background but they use waybill/card cards, and all sorts of variation of that. I simply listed how I do it. It takes a little learning how a railroad operates, but your layout is yours to run in your way, dispite boo birds who will tell you how it should work. I was fortunate to have worked for a railroad for a few years while going to seminary and then getting my new career started after graduation. But I also grew up in a railroad family, so I pretty much know how the railroads operate in my time frame. Haven’t much of a clue about todays railroads though.
Not all operators use car cards and waybills, some use switch lists, wheel reports, etc. The idea for them, and for me is to run our layouts as correctly as possible because that is what we want to do.
A lot of modelers could care less and it sounds to me like you fall in that catagory. Your choice and your right. We don’t belong to unions that require us to do model railroading a certain way. If you want more information about waybills and car cards, we will be glad to help you. If you just want to run trains, then you should do so, and you don’t need an elaborate system.
One school of thought would make the waybill moves only between places where the cars load or unload (which may be off line).
Another would be to make each move between status changes (load to unload, dirty to clean, hot to iced, etc).
If you want to send it to the yard to clean, send it to be cleaned (the cleaning track) but don’t make the yard itself a destination. A yard is just a processing point.
I think wether or not a car needs cleaned depends on what is going in it. If it’s foodstuffs then yes it should be cleaned first if it’s coal who cares?
My guess is that merchanise boxcars flatcars and gondolas usually weren’t cleaned ut refers almost certainly were. Now those cars could be sent to a yard for cleaning, cleaning could be handled at an icing dock or even cleaned when it arrives at the customers location (but that’s bad customer service)
Wether you want to make cleaning a part of your operations is up to you as is where the cleaning happens. This would be easy to note on you car cards saying “return to X when empty for cleaning” Or you could make certin cars forbidden at certain industries like “no liquid sulfer cars to bakery”
Waybills can be as simple or complex as you want to make em.
Afaik (as far as I know) all four cycles should be industrial destinations, and it is up to the yardmaster to decide how to get them there. Usually, locals go out and drop off only the cars that they started with, and return with the rest to the yard. Then, the yardmaster see’s where the cars are going, and splits them up into trains going in the same direction. He then orders those trains to drop off said cars. So, I would say that you make all the car cards eight cycle waybills, mentally routing the car via a yard whenever possible.
While I generally agree with you, its ironic that that the two car cleaning operations I’ve been involved with were for loading paper and another for loading coal, so neither were for food products.
The coal was kind of a special case. There was a move where iron ore (taconite) was loaded in hoppers and sent to a steel mill, the empty hoppers were cleaned and sent to a coal mine, the loaded hoppers of coal were sent to a power plant and the empties were sent back to the taconite plant. At a modern power plant coal is typically pulverized to a powder and blown into the boiler to burn. That way it burns faster and hotter. The coal is pulverized by passing it between two rollers.
If there were hard taconite “marbles” in the coal, when the coal went throught the rollers, the taconite wouldn’t crush and would either damage the rollers or any of the coal that went through with the taconite wouldn’t be crushed either and would either jam up the boiler, burn slower or wouldn’t be blown into the boiler.
Having said all that, cleaning a coal car was and would be a special case.
In ‘perfect’ world, cars are to be cleaned by the consignee before being released back to the railroad. In actual ‘real world’ operation, it rarely happens - Unless the car interior is really trashed or it the cleaning costs to remove the trash/dunnage are too high.