I was wondering if there are any better methods for operations than the ones I'm currently using. I have spent a great deal of time and effort creating "car cards" and an equal amount of time creating waybills. And the system works very well. It's very simple to use. One of the minor issues is my layout isn't terriby large and I don't have enough industries to fully use the 4 cycle waybill. In fact most of the cars go to one industry and then go to some offline industry (staging). Seems like a lot of effort to create waybills for just one industry. I've also downloaded the JMRI program and it will generate switch lists for various industries, and I have had some success with this. However this is a massive program that requires entering a lot of data and I usually end up making a mistake somewhere which causes the program to not want to build a train or something. I can usually figure out what I did wrong but that takes time. Is there anything, any program, any software, in between really simple and really complicated that anybody has found useful. I really don't want to handwrite a bunch of switchlists, so if I can get my computer to do most of the work that would be great.
Jim
First advice: don't force yourself to use all four "sides" of the waybill. Just use whatever you need to in order to make the operation work as desired.
Second advice: you can remove and reassign waybills to cars. Don't force yourself into thinking that each waybill is permanently assigned to its car.
If you allow yourself to open your mind a little it's actually a very flexible system. And doesn't need to be complicated, although you can make it so. If your layout isn't very large, the effort to create appropriate car cards and waybills shouldn't actually be very high.
Chris van der Heide
My Algoma Central Railway Modeling Blog
Jim:
I agree with Chris on this. I have at least three times as many waybills as I do carcards. A shipper does not care what boxcar he gets, as long as he gets one. A parts receiver wants the parts, how they get there is no concern of his.
On a short train, less than 10 cars, why bother with a switch list? As you make up a train to switch Davidsville, only send cars for industries in that town. Let the operator sort as necessary.
The simpler the system, the fewer mistakes will be made, and hopefully by looking at a waybill that says to Bill's when it is at Fred's your operators will move it to Bills, problem solved.
Dave
Also, you can do what I do and use the extra "sides" of the waybills to simulate bridge traffice over your layout for through trains that don't stop on the layout to make pickups and setouts.
Kevin
http://chatanuga.org/RailPage.html
http://chatanuga.org/WLMR.html
chatanuga Also, you can do what I do and use the extra "sides" of the waybills to simulate bridge traffice over your layout for through trains that don't stop on the layout to make pickups and setouts. Kevin
Another option is to use completely separate waybills for that and still only use 1-2 sides on each one, to better control which cars are actually coming in to your industries. If you replace waybills on cars in staging and don't permanently assign them to a specific car you don't need to keep them rotating between multiple points.
I agree that if you have a small layout, computer-generated paperwork is overkill unless you really want computers to be a big part of how you do this hobby.
Lots of other good advice already, too.
Here's one thing I've been working into my own CCWB system, MT/empty car forwarding cards. I have several locations where locals and switch crews need to pickup MTs to replace the loaded cars they will be pulling. Typically the car card has a Return To: line on it, but that just gets it back to the location of whatever crew base particular types of cars collect at. Then I as the yardmaster there add the MT car cards based on "orders from the mines" or whichever industry is being supplied.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL