Too many cars?

[IRONROOSTER]

This has been discussed in several magazine articles, books, forums, etc. over the years. 

The one I like the best is start with all your yards empty, all your staging tracks full, and industry tracks 50% full.

Personally, I just start with a few cars - 5 or 6.  Swtich those a few times then add more if it seems there is room for them.  I am doing this now as I build my current railroad with each  addition of track allowing more cars.

Paul

[John-NYBW]

Experience is the only way to determine the right amount of cars. Start with what you think is right and simply add or subtract until arrive at the correct number. I don't think there is any formula that will give you the answer. 

[cefinkjr]

ricktrains4824 & dehusman

Your replies were the kind of information I was looking for although your recommended ratios of 90% and 50% of track capacity varied a good bit.  My memory was of a ratio of 70%.

The railroad in question is the Texas Northern Model Railroad Club's 3,000 sq ft layout and its 246' double tracked main, an 11-track classification yard, a 7-track staging yard and, depending on how you count them, 8 or 10 industrial areas.  The last time I asked how many cars were on the layout, the answer was "about 400"; I have no reason to doubt that this is pretty accurate.

I have always felt that yard or industrial switching was made more difficult (and frustrating) than it should be because we have too many cars to handle.  Your answers give me a starting point (other than my somewhat unreliable memory) for suggesting change.

Thanks for your replies. 

[PRR8259]

I have acquired too many freight cars for me and our layout.  The cash value of all the highly detailed cars is higher than I want it to be with one son in college, and one approaching college.  To add to that, my younger son likes UP stuff and anything "more modern", while I am trying to focus on ATSF 1969 through 1972, so we have essentially two separate fleets.

For what I like, since I basically railfan my own trains, it looks like I will focus on just the boxcar and reefer traffic, and I just bought some decent storage boxes for freight cars.

A bunch of other freight cars and engines are being sold.

[kasskaboose]

Defining "too many" cars is near-impossible.  I don't keep my 100 freight cars on the layout.  Instead, I keep all on a shelf until I need to stage operations.  Operations are fun, depending on the siding, I put 6-12 cars in each.  This might appear low, but they are longer since I model the 1980s. When I combine cars from 2+ industries, I can get a suitable number of cars without looking unwieldy.  I defer to my engineer friends who can discuss force, acceleration, etc.

Bottom line: there really isn't an easy answer. 

[dehusman]

Back to the original question.

There are two aspects here, mix (which most of the answers have be about) and inventory (total car capacity of the layout.

Basically, about half full is a fluid size for a car inventory.  Add up the car capacity of the yards and all the indusry tracks.  Divide that by two and that is a good rough start for layout inventory.

I have 280 cars of space in yards, staging and interchanges, and 121 cars of room in industry tracks, for a total of 401 cars of room.  I have about 220 cars on the layout, so about half full.  I can add another 10-20 cars to the layout, but if I add 50 more cars it will start getting full and adding 100 more cars the layout will seem congested.

I model the P&R (Reading railroad) and have interchanges with the PRR  and B&O.  My goal of car mix was that every train (10-15 cars) should have at least one, preferrably two, P&R cars and one PRR or B&O car in it.

I have then tried to balance car mix by industry demand.  I have lots of iron and steel industry so I am very heavy on gons and hoppers.  I model an east coast railroad so I try to have more east coast cars.  I have a large textile mill so I do have a selection of southern road cars to bring in cotton.

Detailed breakdowns of my car fleet are in the Rolling Stock section of my website:

Rolling Stock Roster – Wilmington & Northern Branch (wnbranch.com)

[NorthBrit]

Too many cars?   I suppose it depends how to look at things.

Let's take a factory for instance.  Any factory prodiucing anything.

 

A car to deliver the raw matrial to the factory.   A car to take the finished product away.    Fuel to heat the factory  be it coal or oil.    Staff need feeding.   Other incidentals  such as packaging, stationery to be delivered.

Over a week that could be three maybe four cars daily minimum

Leeds Sovereign Street has six factories.  At least eighteen cars daily.

Then there are through traffic for factories along the line (though not modelled).

I have 68 cars, technically I do not have enough. 

 

David

[BEAUSABRE]

John Teichmoller suggested that the average modeler has too many PRR hoppers (Hopper trafiic tended to be from on-line mine to consumer or maybe an adjoining railroad) and too few Pennsy boxcars.

[John-NYBW]

I discovered I had too many cars when I began full blown operations. All the while I was building my layout, I was accumulating freight cars. I thought my layout was big enough that the thought never hit me that I had too many. I could fit them all on my layout but it clogged everything up. There wasn't enough free space to move trains to. I realized I had to remove some of the freight cars from the layout. I still had about 3 dozen unbuilt cars, mostly Accurail. I now have storage drawers at one of my staging yards and I will fiddle the cars on and off the layout as I see fit. I've also made the decision to go with shorter train lengths, both for freight and passenger trains. It has definitely improved operations. 

[rrebell]

I solved a lot of my too many cars by upgrading my standards. 

[SeeYou190]

MisterBeasley

At some point, I read that some high percentage of rolling stock should be "home road." 

This has been one of my biggest complaints about most freelanced railroads. There are just way too few home road cars on most of them.

-Photograph by Kevin Parson

The STRATTON AND GILLETTE has plenty of home road freight cars. I think it is at 30% to 35%, with the DAWDLE AND DELAY at about 10% to 15% of the fleet. That is 40% to 50% of the fleet being one of the two home roads.

-Kevin

[tstage]

I just reviewed my Excel inventory spreadsheet.  Here's the breakdown of my rolling stock numbers...

• 73 boxcars - 36', 40', and 50'
• 17 cabooses - 24', 26', 30', 34', 40', and 42' - 6 are unbuilt kits; 1 kitbashed
• 3 flatcars
• 24 gondolas - 40', 41', 46', and 52'
• 56 hoppers
• 1 steam heat trailer
• 16 reefers
• 6 stock cars
• 22 tank cars
• 19 passenger cars

That's a total of 237 pieces of rolling stock.  At least 75% of those were built from kits over the past 17 years.  40% are my home road (and affiliate roads); 60% other roads - mostly roads east of the Mississippi but a decent number of western heralds.  I also enjoy finding obscure roads that might find their way onto an NYC train.

Tom

[Track fiddler]

Evening

I don't think there's any such thing as having too many cars but if there is I'm definitely guilty.

If I ever get any of them on the layout someday that would be nice.

I guess I won't have to worry about that right now as I made a rule for myself that I won't be laying any track until everything that's time-consuming is completed.

My other layouts when I was young never got anything done because I was too busy playing Choo Choo all day...

This too many cars in service at one time for realistic operations makes complete sense to me though.  As I have no idea what business the Double Stacks will ever be doing on my layout someday.  I just bought a couple sets because I thought they looked neat

 

 

TF

[doctorwayne]

cefinkjr

I seem to recall an article in MR (or maybe some other magazine) many years ago that suggested operations on our layouts could be improved by limiting the number of cars we have in service. IIRC, the article suggested that we should limit the number of cars on our railroads by type according to the capacity of the places each type could logically be stopped.

Probably a good suggestion, but that shouldn't necessarily mean you'd have to limit how many cars you own, but only how many cars are in use at any time.

I have around 400 freight cars, 40 or 50 pieces of passenger equipment and a couple dozen MoW cars, along with perhaps 30 steam locos.

In most cases, about 1/5 of each the aforementioned items would be on-layout at any given time.
Many will end-up at various on-layout industries, either for loading or unloading, while others may be simply travelling from one staging area to another, or back to the box in which they're usually stored.

About one third of my freight cars are lettered for my "home-roads", but I also have cars from all over North America, and I generally use them wherever I want - not necessarily prototypical for some of them, but this is a model railroad, not a real one.

Wayne

 

[MisterBeasley]

At some point, I read that some high percentage of rolling stock should be "home road."  I have been slipping into the habit of getting more Milwaukee box cars, which Accurail regularly supplies.  So, I now probably have more rolling stock than I need, but it looks pretty good between the Milwaukee power and the Milwaukee caboose.

At a train show, I found a Milwaukee ice service reefer.  It's a great reefer for my fleet.  Of all the rolling stock I've added in the last few years, it's one of my favorites.

 

[ricktrains4824]

That depends a lot on layout size, and operation style.

A 18" wide 8' long shelf layout designed for industry switching can fit way fewer cars than a large 20x20 club layout designed for mainline ops.

Generally, if a operations style layout, no more cars than needed for a full ops session, smooth switching and ops is the goal, so less cars is better. Goal is operations without bottlenecks. If bottlenecks occur, even occasionally, it is a major issue.

If it's built to display your trains or railfan, more cars can fit. Now the goal is to see more trains, even if operations is impacted by that. Bottlenecks can and do occur, but are not a big deal.

I seem to recall that you should count all car spots, all available in both industry and yard, then subtract 10-15% if switching ops style, then adjust the number up or down from there for smooth operations. 

But if it's designed for mainline running and more "railfan" style ops, then you could go right up to the spot limit, or even slightly passed said number of spots, without problems. 

So the answer? It depends..... 

[cefinkjr]

dstarr I'm pretty much in the same boat as you but probably on a smaller scale. I've got nearly 100 freight cars and about 20 passenger cars but no home layout; I operate on a club layout.

That club layout is unfortunately jammed with what I think is too many cars for less stressful operations. What I'm looking for here is others' estimations of how many cars are too many for realistic operations.

[dstarr]

I enjoy building rolling stock models, from scratch, from kits, kitbashed, any old way.  Result, after many years of model building I have far more cars than will fit on my layout.  The extra cars live in the boxes they came in, on shelves in my shop.  Every so often I take some cars out of the shop and put them on the layout, and I have to take some cars off the layout and put them in their boxes on the shelves.  It's a hobby, I do the part I enjoy.  If that gives me more cars than I need (a lot more cars than I need) so be it. 

[chatanuga]

I kind of remember what you're referring to.  Can't remember what issue that was in though.  I do know that a while back I got more of the A-Line/Proto Power West storage trays for offline storage of my rolling stock after realizing that my staging yards were getting too full, and it was spilling out onto the rest of the layout, which made it difficult to get trains in and out of the yards as well as sort cars in the yards.

Kevin

[cefinkjr]

I seem to recall an article in MR (or maybe some other magazine) many years ago that suggested operations on our layouts could be improved by limiting the number of cars we have in service. IIRC, the article suggested that we should limit the number of cars on our railroads by type according to the capacity of the places each type could logically be stopped. I think it suggested some ratio of cars to total capacity but I'm not sure what that ratio was.

I've searched the MR archive unsuccessfully for that article. Can anyone point me to it or does anyone have a better memory of it than I have?

Any experience or thoughts along these lines would also be appreciated.