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Operations - How to Create a "String Diagram"
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<p>Take your towns and sidings.</p><p>For example I might have three towns where my trains can pass each other.</p><p>I will draw a big tic tac toe type diagram on paper.</p><p> [img]http://img180.imageshack.us/img180/5535/meetmatrixcq3.png[/img] </p><p> </p><p>Now. </p><p>My yard and my Staging are not on this chart. For purposes of clarity I can assign the yard to the left side and staging to the right side because that is how the trains must travel to get to the yard where they are broken down into locals to the three towns. </p><p>Who cares how many towns? How many mile posts? How many sidings? You can add fewer squares or many squares running trains down to 10 minute values in between 50 towns across 120 miles in a 24 hour period.</p><p>Such a huge chart will be a frankenstien and be a dispatcher's night mare as soon as one train starts to run late.</p><p>In my case, my time slots are a nice generous 6 hour blocks of time. Most charts Ive seen are cut down to 15 minute blocks on a much longer sheet. As the day progresses a dispatcher might have a line starting for each train generated and marked off as it progressed across a territory.</p><p>If.. in town one first thing in the morning the Mine run is returning to the yard with a load of coal waiting in the siding. The meet would be arranged so that when my Local arrives there from the yard, the mine train will be clear to finish the meet and proceed to the yard.</p><p>I run sequence operation, one train at a time. When you throw in two or more operators this plan starts to suffer a sort of load that takes away availible siding capacity. Obviously if the chart is full and a new train is sortied ... let's call out the big hook to fix the wreck in town two... it's going to potentially melt down the system.</p><p>There might be other meets scheduled for later in the day.</p><p>That is the best I can do for now, I will learn more about this hopefully as others contribute thier ideas about diagramming meets in time and space.</p><p>As far as I know this system works with any size railroad, ignoring for the moment the awful fact that a caboose on someone's train might still be in the last town visited.</p>
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