I am working to set up the car cards and waybills for my new layout. I believe this job would be easier if the layout were complete, but it is not. I want to set up the waybills as I build so I can get used to how they run as I am able to run on each section. I downloaded Shenendoah Software’s Industry Manager and NMRA OPSIG’s 40,000 industry database thinking this would be a breeze. The problem is I am too anal–I want traffic patterns to represent realistic traffic to and from real industries, online and off. I find myself Googling every industry to see if it is still in business. This is going to produce a great set of waybills, but MAN is it a slow process entailing a lot of work.
I believe you should develop them as the layout progresses. I have made some changes to my trackplan based on the traffic the waybills generate. I quickly realized some track capacities would need to be changed because of this.
I based my traffic on what each industry would produce in a 24hr period. This has some operating implications as well. I had to determine max train length in order to decide the number of trains to run in order to service all the industries.
For example, on my Mingo Local, it services a pie company, cold storage facility, box mfg company, aircraft mfg, and 4 other unmodeled industries that are actually off the layout on the track I use to turn the local(actually staging). My max train length is 10-12 cars (I actually use inches to determine max length) depending on what the makeup of the cars are. The pie company and the cold storage are high volume industries, they are serviced twice a day. The others are serviced by the second trick only.
When developing the waybills, I first determined how many carloads each industry would produce in a 24hr period. Then after much research on the subject, I determined how many waybills I would need to make. This helped me determine how many cars I actually needed of each type as well (another added bonus). This inturn helped me determine how many trains I would need to run between terminals (staging to main yard to staging) as well as the number of locals I would need.
It has been a very enjoyable facit of the hobby I never considered until I got into it. I am not nearly as detailed as it sounds like you are, I have simple waybills, and in the beginning I just used East and West for destinations off the layout (staging). I have gone back and added actual terminals instead of just East or West. I did this when I had enough of the layout done to add more realism to operations. Instead of a West manifest departing the yard wh
I use a simple 2 cycle waybill…One for empties for loads and others for inbound or outbound loads and out bound empties.You see not all of my industries ship by rail only receive
All of my car cards have instructions…Return to CSX,CR or NS…Now for say UP,BN,CP,CN SF and other none direct interchange cars I simply have “When empty return via reverse route” which means the cars goes to any direct interchange road that can line haul the empty back toward its home rails.
This is the simplest form of car card/waybill operations that works like a charm and not complicated.
Any system worth doing takes a little while to set up. You have to have faith that the end justifies the means. In this case, you’ve heard the testimony.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not giving up. I’m sure if I were willing to use some credible fictional offline shippers/receivers it would go much more quickly, but I would prefer to not.
So are you going to constantly update they system as the real industries come into existence and go out of business? That seems to be an unnecessary effort. Does it matter if a car is going off layout to Chicago to foundry xyz, or foundy abc? It is going to have the same routing pattern on the layout and be in the same train going “off” layout. I don’t see how having 100% accurate industry names would make the operations any more realistic. Am I missing something?
I think that would be far to complicated and the main question would be do they still use rail service? How would we know? How about new inbound shipments? What if they closed down several departments that received their material in covered hoppers? How about maintenance shut down week?
IMHO the weekly X factor would not be worth the work.
The nice part about setting up waybills is that you only have to do it once!
IMHO, you are creating WAY too much complication. If you have a model of Humongous Industries, Ltd, on your layout, than it should be the destination for inbound loads and the origin of outbound loads, with empties handled as Brakie indicated earlier. If, on the other hand, Humongous Industries receives loads from your online industries but is actually three interchange points beyond Westbound Staging, why even name it. Once the car goes into staging it will get a different waybill before it ever reappears.
I have a small mountain of waybills for my Japanese prototype layout, most of which read either from online industry to Named staging yard or from Named staging yard to online industry. When my four-truck flat appears with a big piece of new machinery for the colliery at the end of the railroad it doesn’t matter whether it was built by Hitachi, Mitsubishi or some constructor in France or Finland. All that matters is that it will have to be spotted under the overhead crane for unloading. In the other direction, all that matters about a gondola load of coal is whether it is routed to Takami (up staging) or Minamijima (down staging.) Where it goes from there is a problem for the bean counters in accounting, not the folks running the railroad.
Another thing I have, for some cars that have no logical destination on the modeled part of the layout, is a special waybill. On one side it reads, From Minamijima to Takami (turn over at Takami.) The other side reads From Takami to Minamijima (turn over at Minamijima.) The cars can shuttle back and forth from staging to staging, generating through traffic and making the through freights longer, without any problems. (Plans call for staging to hold more trains than would be operated on all but the busiest days.)
I am modeling the summer of 2000, so my goal is to have industries, online and off, that were shipping/receiving in that time period. I’m not concerned whether they are shipping/receiving today, just in the time period modeled. What I really want to avoid id shipping to/from offline industries in 2000 that stoped shipping or ceased to exist 30 years earlier. Shenendoah’s Industry Manager includes 40,000 industries, yes. But the majority of them either ceased to exist or stopped shipping/receiving via rail years ago.
