Hi guys
i have been thinking about how I want to do operations on my small layout and think I want to go the car card waybill and switch list route. Is the micro mark set a good place to start or are there other places you guys might now where I can print off and make my own
any tips would be great
jeremy
Jeremy,
I have been using the micro mark car card system for awhile and have found it an easy and enjoyable way to operate the layout. I picked up the starter set and have added boxes and additional sets of cards when micro mark has sales. I'm sure there are programs and other ways to make your own that I will let others weigh in on but for me the micro mark system was the simplest.
Each car has a card as do the engines. I have four destinations on the waybills sometimes going to places on the layout and sometimes off the layout to staging. My railroad is a little larger than yours but I;m sure it will work for you also.
Marty C
If LION wanted to play cards, him would go up and play pinochle with the other guys, (Or bridge with the old ladies).
Here is copy of a blank TRAIN REGISTER. It is for one 24 hour cycle, and does not include the express trains which are the responsiblity of the Nevins Street Tower, nor does it include work trains that run on the overnight, and can blow big holes in the "planned schedule".
THAT is a TRAIN SCHEDULE!
ROAR
The Route of the Broadway Lion The Largest Subway Layout in North Dakota.
Here there be cats. LIONS with CAMERAS
There are many examples of car cards and switch lists on the Internet that can be found through a simple search using any of the popular search engines.
Jeremy:
I made my own cards from file cards. A 4"x6" inch cut in half, and then one half cut again, and a little clear tape makes a car card. A 3x5 cut in half makes a waybill, four sided of course.
You also need industry boxes around the layour, labelled of course to put the card in when the car is spotted.
I do not bother with switch lists as I consider the carcard system direction enough as to where the cars go, and the same for car pickups. Others may differ with this opinion, and perhaps larger layouts would change my mind.
David
I'll elaborate a little on David comments on switchlists. So long as it's just you operating, switchlists are superfluous if you're using car cards. That's probably also the case with smaller layout with a limited number of industry spots.
My ops have trouble keeping track of all the cards and boxes in relation to the industries served. On average, they covered maybe 50% of the drops, where they left the yard with cards in hand. But they usually only picked up well under 50% of loads and MTs that needed it out on the road. Maybe they're still learning the ropes, but I decided to move the cards myself, but only after making up swicthlists based on them to give to the ops to work their trains. I then get the switchlist back and use it to update card location to where the car is sitting, as well as to verify the movement. This has considerably improved things without much extra work.
Mike Lehman
Urbana, IL
BroadwayLion If LION wanted to play cards, him would go up and play pinochle with the other guys, (Or bridge with the old ladies). Here is copy of a blank TRAIN REGISTER. It is for one 24 hour cycle, and does not include the express trains which are the responsiblity of the Nevins Street Tower, nor does it include work trains that run on the overnight, and can blow big holes in the "planned schedule". THAT is a TRAIN SCHEDULE! ROAR
Train registers and schedules have absolutely nothing to do with car cards.
Car cards are a freight forwarding system - how individual cars move.
Schedules are a dispatching system - how entire trains move. (A train register is tool that is one part of the dispatching system.)
These are completely separate and have no relation to each other other than being under the greater umbrella of "operations". The greatest mistake people keep making is to not to keep these concepts completely separate in these discussions.
Chris van der Heide
My Algoma Central Railway Modeling Blog
The Micro Mark cards and bills work fine. I use them. I'm not as impressed with their waybill boxes or other associated materials, so I just purchase the car cars and waybills separately.
If you wan't switchlists, it won't be necessary to have car cards too for most people, although a few layouts do utilize the cards for organizing things and have hand-written switchlists for the actual work at the industries and yards.
Rob Spangler
Micro Mark CC&WB are fine.
You can also use almost any word processing or spreadsheet program to build your own CC&WB paperwork. Then just print them out on heavy paper and cut them apart. Making blank forms is pretty simple and cheap (your time is the biggest investment). For a small layout I would say it is a push between home brewed and Micro Mark. For a bigger layout the more sophisticated software will have the advantage of being able to auto fill some or all of the data. I use a home made Access database to generate CC&WB, but that would be overkill for a small layout.
Dave H. Painted side goes up. My website : wnbranch.com
If you have rudimentary wood tools, the car card boxes are easy to make. Basically, they're 3 different widths of 1/8" or 1/4" chipboard or masonite. One strip is for the front, another forms the bottoms and dividers, and the tallest is the back. Cut the strips to width, then chop them to the correct length for your plans. These can be glued together and there you have it.
Thanks for the tips fellas,
I was also thinking of maybe just making up a little list for me to go by. Example
Deliver 2 empty hoppers to grain elevator
Deliver 3 empty bobcars to grocery warehouse
Something along the lines of that, I think waybills would be overdoing it for my layout?
JeremyBDeliver 2 empty hoppers to grain elevator Deliver 3 empty bobcars to grocery warehouse Something along the lines of that, I think waybills would be overdoing it for my layout?
Not at all. They just serve as instructions on where to send cars. A car card/waybill system is easy to set up and self-perpetuating. Once you have them filled out you don't have to worry about them again, just flip the bills at the industries or staging to the next side, then pick up and run from where you left off last time.
JeremyB I was also thinking of maybe just making up a little list for me to go by. Example Deliver 2 empty hoppers to grain elevator Deliver 3 empty bobcars to grocery warehouse
Switchlists work and are about the cheapest (use any scrap of paper)
For the next level above what you have suggested, you can say which specific car goes to which specific place
ABCX 23456 grain elevator
IAIS 34567 grain elevator
UP 366890 grain elevator
MP366201 grocery door 1
BNSF 12789 grocery door 2
NS 678234 grocery door 3
And don't forget that cars have to be pulled from industry too.
Thanks for the tips fellas, I appreciate it I guess the biggest thing is making sure I dont keep using the same cars and that all the freight cars get to see layout time.
Strongly agree that operating to a schedule is one thing; car routing and forwarding is quite another. But recall our friend the Lion is talking about subways which perhaps do not change their consists all that much, but which rigidly adhere to a schedule. Presumably that is where the prime fun is on a subway layout.
There are also such refinements as train priority (class of trains; east bound over west bound within the same class; the role of the dispatcher; that sort of thing). Kalmbach collected a bunch of Andy Sperandeo's monthly Operators columns on these topics into a booklet a few years ago -- and then of course Andy kept writing more columns! That booklet is an excellent way to get into the whole operations mindset (even if you have the original magazines as I do).
For car forwarding a buddy of mine first got into it with an index card he created vertical format that listed the various destinations for the car -- in a sort of descending sequence -- including having the car be on a through freight west or through freight east meaning it ended up in staging -- and THEN -- "off layout." Or sometimes "off layout" appeared more than once on the card; he varied that. The car would be placed in a cabinet and the car card put in the back of a card index box. With each car card placed in the back of the box, a card at the front would be pulled out and the matching car taken from the cabinet and placed on the layout in staging. The car placed in a cabinet might be a reefer with its various destinations and the one taken from the cabinet might be a tank car with its various (and obviously very different) destinations. This helped tremendously in keeping each session from seeming like the one before it and each freight train looked and operated differently too. That kept folks on their toes.
Sometimes the four cycles of the car cards make it seem like the same session sequence follows in order. You need a way to freshen it up.
He would mark the accomplishment of the next destination on the card with a paperclip that he would simply move down. This worked but sometimes the clips got so tangled up that you did not really know where in the sequence he was. He eventually replaced that paper clip idea with all new cards with a grid of boxes to be checked in pencil. In theory when the grid was filled he'd erase the whole thing and start over but well before a card got filled (and it could take months and perhaps even over a year before a car placed into the cabinet would be removed and used again) he changed systems.
The end result is that he always had about the same number of cars on the layout and thus usually had room for them in his yards and sidings. I say "usually" because his file card box system did not distinguish between a 34' hopper car taken off the layout and 89' flatcar placed on it.
I think the idea of a system -- any system -- that gets the cars off the layout (and new ones on it) in an orderly way is a good one. Most of us have way too many cars to all be on the layout at one time anyway, or we needlessly stuff our staging yards with every car we own.
The matter of schedule and train priority might matter more if you have a lot of passenger trains. I have seen some large and sophisticated layouts operate quite well based on the old "sequential" idea versus true timetable/fast clock schedule.
Dave Nelson
I use the Basic Waybill and Car Card Type 1 available here: http://www.nmra.org.au/Pages/waybills.html
Print, cut, fold and tape.
dknelson I think the idea of a system -- any system -- that gets the cars off the layout (and new ones on it) in an orderly way is a good one. Most of us have way too many cars to all be on the layout at one time anyway, or we needlessly stuff our staging yards with every car we own.
Years ago I was a regular on an operating layout and the owner kept all of his cars on the layout. Besides having his yards constantly jammed with cars, trains that went to an Interchange early in the evening would return to the yard later with the same cars that were sent out in the last Interchange train. The yard masters were constantly switching the same cars. On my layout I may not see a particular car for months depending on how long it takes to rotate back onto the layout.