Hello!
My club is trying to put together a switch list. We are using waybills. Dose anyone know what the return car to _______, mean? How is a way bill made up. I know that you put the type of car i along with the car number, the company or railroad, and what it hauls along with loading point and unloading point.
Any help would be great!
Also visit, www.westcentralrr.org.
Jay
If you want to use waybills to generate a switchlist, it’s fine, but it’s not necessary. Many people just work from the waybills themselves as sort of a dynamic switchlist.
You mentioned a couple of concepts. In the traditional car-card-and-waybill system, the car cards contain information that does not change from session to session … like the RR name and car number. The waybills describe each destination for the car … the industry or off-layout location.
The “return car to ___" is an optional entry that is not necessary in many systems that don’t separate the waybill from the car card … the empty moves are just another destination on the waybill. Short answer, many layouts will never need the "return car to” entry…
It’s a lot easier to do than to explain, but I did try to describe the waybill-writing process in some detail in this thread:
http://www.trains.com/community/forum/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=46614
The discussion of waybills begins about halfway down the first page.
Regards,
Byron
The RETURN car to _____ is used on the real railroads for reverse routing of an EMPTY car. Normal car interchange rules allow for an empty car to be ‘captured’ and re-used for loading(if a load can be found) or it must be returned via the ‘Reverse Route’ that it took to get to the consignee(place it was unloaded at). This is done so that all of the lines that participated in the revenue generating ‘load’, share the effort to return the empty car to it’s owner. An example would be a car loaded on BNSF in Minneapolis, is routed to UP at Chicago and travels over the UP to Los Angeles. UP would have to move the car after it is unloaded back over UP lines to Chicago to hand it back to BNSF for movement back to Minneapolis. It would not be fair if UP handed the car back to BNSF in Los Angeles and BNSF had to use diesel fuel to move the car all the way home. The idea is that if you made money off of the ‘load’ haul, you have to share the expense involved in moving the empty car home.
The car may also be in some type of captured service and there are ‘special instructions’ for routing it home. On my model railroad, I have that space stamped with ‘Return via Reverse Route’ or via ‘Home Interchange’ for most cars. Since I have East and West staging, I have a list of which staging is ‘Home Staging’ for off-line cars. I also has ‘Special Instructions’ in that area for my fleet of Swift meat reefers. They are private owners and the car cards are marked with ‘Return to Swift & Co - Pecatonica, Wisc’ I have 3 tracks in my packing plant, and there are always ‘perspective’ empties stored for icing and swinging beef loading on the ‘Yukon Dock’.
The more time and reason you put into the operation, the better it will get!
Jim Bernier
Jim,
You gave a great explanation. I do think that for most beginners, adding those same empty moves or return moves as one of the waybill cycles is more straightforward, since many poeple don’t remove the waybill from the car card.
For more advanced operating layouts, I agree with you that allowing the waybill card to be removed after the cycle is completed and then leaving the car card “empty” is a great enhancement to realism. As you mentioned, you can then think about routing the empty appropriately, “capturing” non-home-road empties with a load to avoid per diem charges, etc.
One of the great things about car-card-and-waybill is its flexibility for beginners and more advanced operating schemes. One doesn’t need to start with all the complexity at once.
Regards,
Byron
Thanks Bryon and everyone! We are just getting off the gound with this.
Jay