Hi,
I’m putting the finishing touches to my railroad plans, based in and around Pittsburgh, and one of the industries is a paper mill which needs to get Kaolin cars from Sandersville and then return the empties.
Does anyone know how cars would be routed from Sandersville to Pittsburgh? I know its likely to be an NS train, but coming from where?
If it helps, my layout simulates lines coming from the direction of Washington D.C, Chicago and the Pittsburgh line.
Thanks,
Mike
I think I might have found an answer.
It looks like Enola Yard in Harrisburg handles traffic from NS southern area, and then dispatches traffic elsewhere on the NS network.
I have an interchange yard on my layout plan called Banastre Yard, so if I’m right I would set out a waybill for a typical Kaolin tank car as follows:
Enola Yard (On my Pittsburgh E Staging area) → Banastre Yard
Banastre Yard → Paper Mill
Paper Mill → Banastre Yard (empty)
Banastre Yard → Enola Yard (empty)
Does that sound kind of right?
Mike
Nope, because stops at yards are not individual moves on a waybill, it’s just part of that one move. Banastre yard shouldn’t be a destination on your waybill.
Your waybill would be two moves:
loaded Sandersville (Enola staging) → paper mill.
empty paper mill → Sandersville (Enola staging)
The stops at various yards, interchanges and transfer tracks are all part of the move, not separate moves.
Waybills should not be turned at intermediate points in the car’s journey (unless you’re using it to model some sort of diversion or “storage-in-transit” operation), only after the car has reached its final destination and is now loaded/unloaded and ready to go back.
If it were me the way bill (or car card) would read Sandersville (via Potomac Yard) for the empty, and Paper Mill (via Pittsburgh) for the load.
For the load, I’m assuming that the incoming train from staging drops its cut of cars for Banastre at which point they are switched into the appropriate track for the local that services the mill. The Banastre yardman could care less about where the car came from. All he needs to know is where he needs to send it. On the other hand, when Enola gets re-staged if all the car card says on it is Paper Mill, the person doing the re-staging does not have enough information to know where the car is supposed to go. The via Pittsburgh tells him that the car gets put in the cut that drops at Pittsburgh, not in the cut that continues further west.
For the empty car, the local crew that picks it up could care less as to where it is supposed to go. All they need to know is that they take the car to Banastre. Now the Banastre yardman does need to know what to do with the car. He may not know where Sandersville is exactly, but the via Potomac Yard tells him that it is somewhere south. So he looks at his cheat sheet and it tells him that the Enola train gets cars going on to Potomac Yard, and this includes other south destinations such as Norfolk, Atlanta, Florida, etc.
One other thing that the via Potomac Yard does for the model railroad is impart the illusion that the car is actually going some place other
Well yes, of course you would replace the generic “paper mill” with the complete name and location (town/station) of said mill - which I didn’t know, I’m not familiar with the OP’s specific geography.
Sandersville, GA* → Acme Papers Inc., Somewhereville, PA
*(via Enola staging)
Potomac Yard and the NS in Pittsburgh never coexisted and would be some odd routing at that. Heading to DC takes it way out of its way and onto foreign tracks for no reason. Northbound from Roanoke, you’d have to cut east to NoVA, stop at the hypothetical NS-Pot Yard, CSX would take over, head north to Pittsburgh, and then hand it back over to the NS or whoever.
Sandersville → Columbia → Charlotte → Winston-Salem → Roanoke → Front Royal → Harrisburg → Pittsburgh is a more logical route.
Current routing for traffic wanting to go from Sandersville to Pittsburgh would be through Macon, Chattanooga, Cincinnati, Columbus, Crestline, Conway
The routing should read:
Sandersville RY(Tennille,Ga),NS…
The shipper and receiver would be on the BOL and switchlist once the car arrived at Conway before being switched into the local for final delivery.
The routing would be the most direct route and Don has pretty well nailed the car(s) route except for Crestline since all NS does is pass through…What remains of the old Crestline yard is CSX and CF&E.
Thanks for all the replies - very useful. I’ve got 9 industries on my layout, some deliver between each other, so that routing is easy, but one or two have quite a wide range of raw materials to be delivered to them, so I’m bound to be back to ask similar questions on routing for those.
Are there any useful publications that concern how freight traffic is routed around the US ?
Mike
There’s several including the Official Railway Guide which I highly recommend.
http://secure2.halldata.com/lu/land.do?w=745&form=2b
You don’t need to subscribe since you can usually find guides for your era on e-Bay.
BTW…Your clay load(s) would be placed in the Conway block (cars bound for Conway and points east) in the train consist at Macon, .