Using Model Railroads as "Off Layout" traffic sources.

Model Railroader General Discussion (Model Railroader)
1

Im working on developing a ops car cards and waybills for the model railroad such as it is.

I feel that there is alot of prototype information of varying precision that offers information on general outbound and inbound freight.

The question I have is this:

What about considering Model Railroads as published in MR or perhaps created as a trackplan on file or presented on the Internet or other books by the builders of thier own railroads for traffic ops sources?

Im not advocating shipping actual model rolling stock in the mail to and from around the world in a true ops fashion, but more of a source to draw on as you fill out your own traffic.

What do you think about using other model railroads as a traffic source in Ops?

2

WHAT U COULD DO IS SHIP MANIFESTS TO OTHER LAYOUTS I.E. 1 REEFER BANANAS TO NY/FROM BAH

JUST AN IDEA

GAV[2c]

3

What you are suggesting is ‘old hat’ - it has been done by several groups through the years. Several modelers in the V&O/AM area have done this in both ‘virtual’ and actually shipping cars to one another. In the 50’s John Allen(G&D) had a tie in with his ‘Bull Line’ stock shippers with Cliff Grandt(T&RGW).

Myself, I just use logical East/West connections at each end of my layout.

Jim Bernier

4

In the late ‘50s (according to a Model Railroader report), a group of model railroaders in the Binghamton, NY area got together and created a “route map” of the areas served by and interchanges between their free-lance lines. Bill Livingston and Chuck Yungkurth were among the members of the group. They even named industries or towns after points of interests on their friends’ layouts.

always re-inventing the wheel

Fred W

5

At one time or another, cars from ‘historical’ model railroads have been available from a variety of sources. Also, many clubs sell decal sets for their club railroad, or even complete cars (usually Athearn BB AAR box cars.) If you acquire some of these, you can integrate them into your operation just like cars with prototype reporting marks - with a permanent instruction to return empty to home road. The difference? Instead of NS or BNSF, the home road might be the Gorre and Daphetid, the Norfolk and Ohio or the Delta Lines.

Of course, you would have to build your own Delta Lines car in HO. The original was O scale.

Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)

6

I think it’s time we listed the availible model railroads with traffic and directional information for interchange?

With the internet it can be done faster than they did it in the 50’s

7

This is a good idea. Another factor to provide information about would be era. It wouldn’t be cricket to send a train of 89’ piggyback flats to an 1880’s narrow gauge lumber operation…

However, a car that originated on a Penn Central layout set in 1970 could feasibly be lost in the ether until the mid 1980’s…

Lee

8

Actually, a bunch of us here on the forum did this a while back. Look for “virtual interchange and shipping office” or something close to that. I seem to recall it went into 10 or 20 pages. Some of us model modern times, others model times past, but we worked around that and had a good time.

Brad

9

Check out Great ModelRailroads 07. They have a column on this practice (I think it is with Bruce Chubb’s layout.)

10

A few friends of mine and me considered doing this, we actually merged our model railroads into an imatation of the “Alphabet Lines” where each railroad kept it’s own identity, but were operated similer to each other; the trains wouldn’t stop between RRs, they’d just keep moving, locomotives would often run onto partner’s railroads, etc.

It joined the White River Southern RR (WRS), the Pennichuck RR (PCRR), the Midland New England Railroad (MNER), and the Vermont And South Troy (VAST) into the New England & Atantic Transportation company (NEAT).

Unfortunatly, the physical interchange never really worked, as only me and one other member had suitable railroads, so that idea kinda flopped. They’re still merged though. All but one of the members are members here on this forum; Me (WRS), Guilford Guy (MNER), and RailroadYoshi (VAST).

If you want more info on the “physical interchange” system, there’s a really neat site for it:

http://www.bnsfchillisub.com/operations.htm

Good luck!

11

To keep the ball rolling…

Would anyone be interested in setting up a website where each railroad would have the ability to track interchange with another railroad?

Each “railroad” would be controlled by a users profile, and each user would log in their cars for their layout. As cars were ready for interchange, users would login and identify a set of cars (or a single if necessary) that were to head to points east/west/north/south.

Then, a railroad could pick up the cars pertaining to the specific industry or load type, and transport them to the next railroad down the line, or put them into a freight local and get them emptied for the trip home. Individual railraods would have the option of choosing who they were connected with for interchange, allowing a complex web of railroads to be connected.

A car status page would allow for you to see the status of the load (full / empty) , location of the car, and if it’s currently in transit on the ‘virtual’ network.

Physical car movements could be made by undecorated rolling stock that has a small “pocket” for inserting a tag with the load, car number, home railroad, and any special instructions.

Car damage or equipment failure could be represented by a random generator based upon things that would happen in the prototype. Broken brake lines, damaged couplers, etc. If an “emergency” happened on a physical railroad while a car was being spotted or in travel, the user would report the emergency and the car would be logged as damaged and needing special attention.

A feature could be integrated to allow for photos of rolling stock and locomotives to be uploaded and stored with each car’s profile. This would be good for insurance purposes, and the specific car owner would be able to enter in purchase cost, upgrade costs, etc for their own personal use.

It would take a fair bit of work, but I could see it happening. I’m a semi-professional web designer tha

12

I’d join! Good idea![tup]

Would it be free?[:-^]

13

wm:

…unless we postulate a spacetime nexus that contains a cargo-transfer point.

“Yay, our Nehru jackets finally arrived!”

14

“There aint no such thing as a free lunch”

No matter what, there’s going to be a cost somewhere along the line. Whether it be the web hosting fees, the domain name purchase, etc, everything costs money. For me, no, it wouldn’t be free.

But, I probably wouldn’t charge for such a thing, no. The trade off is that there would probably be a few various advertisements around the page for various places relating to the MR world to help offset the bandwidth / hosting costs.

A donation link will be setup, and perhaps extra features will be made available to those who donate on a year / 12 month basis. Even if it’s just a dollar or a two quarters a dime and a nickle. It all helps.

15

I for one wouldn’t mind ads, as long as the software worked, I’d be fine. You could host it on googlepages, I’ve heard there free, easy to use, and the ads aren’t the annoying pop-up ones like other sites.

16

About 20 years ago or more, Roundhouse produced a line of freight and passenger cars lettered for John Allen’s Gorre and Daphetid. There may have been other modelers so honored, but he is the only one I know of. I still have a few of them. There was a box car, stock car, and caboose that I know of. I still have one of each. There were also some shortie Overton style passenger cars offered. I have two coaches and one combine.

17

Maybe someday virtual model railroads will take over the hobby and we can interchange our cars electronically. We could have a virtual coast-to-coast, border-to-border railroad network.

18

I sure hope not![:O]

Physical trains are a lot more special to me…[8D]

19

The problem with pages like Geocities, GooglePages, and other “free” hosts, is that they generally restrict what you can do, or how much you can do it.

May free hosts don’t allow the usage of “PHP” and “ASP”, two popular programming languages for the internet for creating interfaces between the “front” of the website you see, and the databases and other information in the “back” of the site that’s processed on the server. If they were to give you access to PHP (my preferred choice of language for the internet interfaces), they don’t give very much space for other things. Database size might be limited, or the whole site may be limited to only 100 megabytes, which is a drop of a needle compared to some of the bigger websites.

Then if you can overcome all of that, bandwidth can become an issue. I’ve maintained websites that average in upwards of 10,000 hits per week, with certain days and periods where we average 3-4000 hits per day. Bandwidth is a major factor, and as people join and add on to their profiles, add photos, etc, you transfer more and more data. In the end, you either buy an “unlimited” bandwidth provision, or you pay “X” amount for ever chunk over a certain amount.

Realistically, I’d like to have as few ads as possible to be able to support something like this. Ad income generation really isn’t worth that much until you start having a few thousand clicks per day, where you the volumn of clicks brings you into the upper price brackets for how much you make per click. The ads would come once things were afloat and I could no longer sustain the bandwidth, storage, and maintainance fees.

I suppose one source of income

20

That many hits pretty much rules out the Fast DSL as a alternative then.

I will have to drill down with questions as to cost of such a website. It would get out of hand unless there was some kind of frame work.

If I wanted to list on such a site, I suppose I would post the railroad, general region of the USA and industries availible for rail service. If several thousand people posted over a year similar ways there is going to be a pretty big list of various eras, industries, interchanges etc.

I reviewed the operations threads in this forum and recalled it became a bit of a monstor just keeping up with several railroads in interchange.