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Shaun, After going to an operating session, I became hooked on the idea of prototypical operations. Designing a layout to operate and coming up with an operational plan will take some time and some reading up on your part. When I built my last layout, I thought I was building a layout designed for operations. After attending a few sessions I realized that my layout was not designed to operate and that was one of the main reasons I tore it out and started over. Others have stated that the basic idea is to take loaded cars from an industry and deliver cars to be loaded. Most of us don't design our layouts with this goal in mind. Most real railraods, however are designed specifically for this purpose. No industry or passengers, no railroad. When some one builds a layout, oftentimes the goal is to watch trains run around. I enjoy this aspect too. What this does is skew the use of space to facilitate running around. A real railroad is often a point to point. No run around. Not real easy to put on the trains, sit back and watch stuff run. We often include loops to return (most layouts are giant loops). The curves eat up all the space which could be used to model industries or other aspects of a prototypical line. Imagine how the space on your layout might be used if there were no loops?? More prototypical operation has to pretty much be built into the layout design from the beginning in order to be most effective. I would suggest that you decide what type of railroad you want to model. Two big categories are : Mainline or branchline. Mainline operations differ significantly from branchlines. Then get some books on the prototypes you are interested in and see what they did and how they were laid out. Mainline modeling with any degree of accuracy takes a lot of space, most of the proto guys model branchlines, you find a lot of clubs modeling mainline. At this point you might want to look at your layout and develop a route for your trains based on what you see in the books and your basic decisions about the type of road you might enjoy. You might pick one industry and develop a plan for it and go from there. Where do the cars for it come from and where will they go??? Beyond what others have mentioned here the topic can get as complicated and detail oriented as you want. There are time tables, fast clocks, train orders, dispatchers, switchlists etc. It can become a game of chess. I have used the car card system described by dayliner. My operational plan is a combo of the car system described by him and timetable operations. The card plan may look difficult on paper but works like a charm and is a fun way to run a railroad without a lot of complication. It really is just shuffling the deck. I would suggest that you check out the opSIg group mentioned earlier in this post. I would also recommend that you attend a prototypical (or any type) operating session in your area. Joe Fugate is a big operations buff. Look up his site. Look up Jack Burgess YV site as well as search MR over the past few years for articles by Dave Adams. You will see that many of these guys took years to sort out their plans and layout designs. I think that you will be able to look at what they have done and adapt it to your layout and operation of it. However, if you get real into operations don't be surprised if you find your current situatiuon lacking a bit .... my 2 cents,
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