I curious to know, when a railroad is referring to a time table, What are they referring to?
I was looking at some photos, and I seen one that said it was a time table but it was just a picture that was very colorful. So is that just it, (a picture) or is there more to it?
Thanks.....
http://cs.trains.com/forums/1417561/ShowPost.aspx
this was discussed over at Trains forums....
quickly put an employee TT is an operating employees ...rules for operation and territory discriptions such as ...speeds, special instructions for grade crossings or RR crossing at grade, signal aspects, contact numbers...dispatcher control..ABS DTC etc etc...
a public timetable has train times (ARR\DEP) stations amenities and such...I.E. Amtrak's timetable
The colorful picture was probably the cover of a public timetable. Inside, you would have found a tabular arrangement of data, basically the train numbers of scheduled trains and their arrival and departure times at the stations along the route. The additional data mentioned above would be included as footnotes in a public timetable, or as entire sections in an employee timetable.
In U.S. transition era practice, public timetables were usually folded sheets, while the employee timetable for a division or subdivision would have resembled a small (or not so small) magazine.
There is another form of timetable, known as a daiya in Japan, useful for planning meets and passes of scheduled trains and finding 'holes' into which to fit extras. It takes the form of a graph, with time plotted along the X axis (across the page) and distance, with horizontal lines for the various stations, plotted on the Y axis (up from the bottom.) A train is represented by a sloping line (degree of slope representing its expected speed) that 'stairsteps' where station stops are scheduled for meets, passes and passenger operations.
For my own modeling, I have both daiya and tabular timetables - in Japanese.
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964)
A timetable originally was the authority for trains to operate across the railroad. It is usually arranged like a spreadsheet with a column of stations down the center. All the trains in one direction are listed on one side and all the trains in the other direction are listed on the other side. For each train, at each station there is a time (or times listed). That train can't leave that station before that time. So the trains all know where the other trains could be after a certain time. There are a lot more intricacies to it, but that's the basics.
Eventually operating by just a timetable became cumbersome due to trains being delayed or running late, so trains were operated by train orders that modified the timetable schedule or operated it in addition to the scheduled trains as an "extra".
Railroads found that running trains extra gave a lot more flexibility so ran fewer and fewer scheduled trains until the 1980's when rules cahnges did away with timetable schedules pretty much all together.
The time table now is a a "road map" for the train crews. It has a list of stations, the distances between the stations, what main track authority is used over the territory, what facilities are at stations, where defect detectors are located, where interlockings are located and any other physical characteristics the crews need. It has lists of train speeds and permanent speed restrictions, yard limits boundries, etc. In addition there are sections of 'special instructions' for the individual territories and the whole railroad. These are changes to the rules and operating practices that may be territory specific or recent revisions of the rules.
Dave H.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
Employee timetables were broken up into two sections:
The schedule pages and the special instructions. The schedule pages contained the schedules for regular trains, which were their operating authorities. Since regular trains and timetable and train order operations have gone the way of the do-do, the schedule pages today simply show stations, method of operation and sidings on a given stretch of railroad. Special instructions, then as now, provide information on the railroad's locomotive fleet, handling instructions for certain car or lading types and modifications to the rule book, and other info.
Public timetables were and are printed for the convenience of the traveling public and contain scheduled times for passenger trains.