Learning "realistic operations"

[Anonymous]

Disciplined operations is new to me. I'm reading Koester's book, information from NMRA and a copy of Doug Smith's Car card and waybills and I have some questions.

My layout allows continuous running, has hidden staging, (4 tracks that can accommodate 14 modern freight cars and two locomotives) and 10 “customers” that can receive about 25 cars. When creating waybills is there a suggest percentage of way bill to allow for local switching and movement between divisions?

Concerning switching, in Smith's article, it is mentioned that a car card goes from "Set Out", to "Hold" and then "Pick Up". What is the purpose of "Hold"? If a car is switched, isn't already in "Hold"?

Does one use a Switch list and way bills to move trains?

Sign me,
Derailed in model railroad land, John

[edkowal]

The use of "Hold" as an action simulates the amount of time that is taken up by loading or unloading the car. It's not too likely that a general freight car will be delivered and picked up in the same operating session. That would mean that crews were hustling that entire load out in a few hours of time, all the paperwork was done and sent to the railroad to generate a new movement, and that the movement order was sent to a local switch job. All in an eight hour or twelve hour shift. There are special cases, like coal loads and such, which are loaded and unloaded quickly.

There's a Yahoo discussion group that discusses questions like this all the time that you might find useful. Look for " Ry-ops-industrialSIG " as the group name at the Yahoo groups site. It's a really interesting group.

-Ed

[Marty Cozad]

This is good to know. Its all new to me to ,even after all these years.
We had our first ops session at our open house and couple of the guys knew what their doing. And the rest of us was lost.[:I]
I've already started making changes to the RR to help running sessions work better.
The biggest problem was that a couple of folks did not know the RR, thus lengths of trains and the sidings ablitiy to hand the cars.
I guess we have to "qualify" an engineer first.[;)]

[cuyama]

QUOTE: Originally posted by nsrrfan

Disciplined operations is new to me. I'm reading Koester's book, information from NMRA and a copy of Doug Smith's Car card and waybills and I have some questions.

Welcome to the operations end of the hobby. I think you'll find it a lot of fun. Koester's book is a very good guide for getting started.

QUOTE: [

My layout allows continuous running, has hidden staging, (4 tracks that can accommodate 14 modern freight cars and two locomotives) and 10 “customers” that can receive about 25 cars. When creating waybills is there a suggest percentage of way bill to allow for local switching and movement between divisions?

This is one of the areas where car-card-and-waybill really shines, It's easy to try a mix that seems right, then adjust it. If you want twice as many cars to move in "overhead" trains each session as are being delivered, adjust the ratio of waybill desitnations accordingly.

My suggestion would be to set up car-cards and waybills for a small proporton of your cars at first ... for example, enouhg to run 25% of the trains you eventually hope to run in a session. Then try it out a couple of times. You'll see quickly how things work by doing. And the process is fun.

QUOTE:

Concerning switching, in Smith's article, it is mentioned that a car card goes from "Set Out", to "Hold" and then "Pick Up". What is the purpose of "Hold"? If a car is switched, isn't already in "Hold"?

Personally, I don't enjoy the Set Out / Hold / Pick-up scheme. I think it's easier to have one box for each industry or industry track and place the car-card-and-waybill there when one spots the car. Between sessions, it's easy to regulate how long a car stays in place by choosing whther or not to cycle the waybill. This way, operators never need to futz with waybills.

QUOTE:


Does one use a Switch list and way bills to move trains?

Some people do, but I personally think it's a lot of extra work for not much return in enjoyment. By simply re-arranging the car-card-and-waybill stack you are carrying around the layout, the paperwork always matches the order of cars in your train and it's easy to keep things straight, IMHO.

YMMV, of course.

Other good resources:
Gateway NMRA ... this link is ot their home page and a number of ops articles are linked there.
http://www.gatewaynmra.org/

Operations Special Interest group
http://www.opsig.org

Regards,

Bryon
http://www.modelrail.us

[leighant]

My layout allows continuous running, has three hidden staging sidings (1 in only single ended)...basically one town the train runs through.


Schematically, I think of running it between Rio Viejo (staging) on the west and Lost River (staging) on the East.


I try to mimic the real railroad which ran a through train east and a through train west daily (no switching in town) and a local peddler freight eastbound one day and wetbound the next. The local was the only train that did any switching in town.
There were also extra through trains, and a doodlebug passenger that ran both east and west daily. I really don't have enough staging to run all the trains I want.

I don't bother with waybills on cars in through trains.
The local is the only train I need to switch waybills on.

I might want to figure ways for other trains to have more to do. But it just wasn't the way the railroad was run.

[dehusman]

The cool thing about car cards is it is very easy to adjust the basic system to how you want to operate. There is somebody using virtually every variation so it really depends on how you want to use it.
You can use the hold box, or you can just not turn, remove the waybill until you think the car should be loaded. Either way works. Some people turn the car cards of the cars loading/unloading backwards so they face away from the modeler to in dicate "hold" cars.

Dave H.

[Anonymous]

QUOTE: Originally posted by edkowal

There's a Yahoo discussion group that discusses questions like this all the time that you might find useful. Look for " Ry-ops-industrialSIG " as the group name at the Yahoo groups site. It's a really interesting group.

-Ed

I am on the Ops list and they are very good:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Ry-ops-industrialSIG/

Also there is a car cards list:

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/CarCards/

Both are very helpful, you will have your head explode with all the information they pass along at the Ops list [;)]

The links that cuyama/Bryon gave are excellent also. I only run/operate my layout with the cards. I have tried a couple of 1 man sessions without them, it wasn't at all the same. It felt almost boring. Operations is that next great step in Model railroading. [tup] My next step is to use the track warrant system to allow movement. I run mine as dark territory. Here is a link to a track warrant program that can help in that respect:

http://www.trainweb.org/mavmrrdigest/upinsmoke/

Here's a page that describes the track warrant idea:

http://www.lundsten.dk/us_signaling/twc/

As for Marty, having that wide open space you have, using the cards and the warrants along with some GMRS/Personal 2 way radios would be the ultimate session, considering you have some distance between everyone. I still drool over your setup [:p]

[jrbernier]

John,

You basically have 56 cars(4 tracks with 14 cars each) that are 'pre-staged'. To keep things simple, let's only use two of your staging tracks. One track has an EB road freight, and the other has a WB road freight. This gives you 28 cars that can move onto/off of/or over your on-stage railroad. Some of those cars move right across your on-stage railroad(thru traffic). Some of them will be setout at your town, and some will be picked up to move off-line.
If you switched out each of those 10 industries every day, you would have 10 setouts, and 10 pickups(very busy) and maybe more if multiple cars are switched at an industry(like grain hoppers). This would mean 20 cars that are going to be dropped off by your two road freights or picked up. This leaves a total of 8 'thru' cars(remember, we are only talking about a total of 28 cars in staging).
The truth is that most industries are not switched that heavy, and may go several days before they see a freight car on their spur. To start, I would bill out maybe 5-6 cars a day for your industries. That way you will only be picking up/setting out 2-3 cars per road freight. At this point, you do not evey have have a car card or waybill for the 'thru' cars that 'bridge' over your railroad. Having your switch engine 'putter around' with maybe 2-3 cars at a time will be very casual and you can increase the 'traffic' when you want a challenge. Good luck with your operational plan!
The 'setout/hold/pickup' pocket scheme was designed to simulate the 72 hour window a shipper or consignee has to load or unload a freight car. This was basically standard practice on the prototype up into the 60's. As more 'specialized' cars came into the system, special loading/unloading instruction came about, and higher durmerage(sp?) charges or penalties were enforced to keep these new high cost cars moving.
Many times modelers use the 'hold' pocket when a car cannot be setout 'on spot' and needs to be spotted the next day. This also works nice for reefers that need to be iced or 'pre-cooled' before loading.
Personally, I do not use switch list - the car card/waybill does it all for me.

Jim Bernier

[jfugate]

When I started realistic operations on my HO Siskiyou Line back in 1998, we started out slow.

I wanted to develop a cadre of guys who knew the layout, first of all -- and second, what the typical trains would run. So to do that I developed a simple sequence of trains that we would run.

No time table, no car cards, no fast clock -- and I acted as "dispatcher" by walking around the layout room and refereeing the action.

Remember, we're all just learning the railroad and the trains at this point. That's enough to start with for most people. It worked very well ... we had fun and after 2 or 3 sessions I had about a half-dozen operators who knew the towns and the train names.

Next, we added radios, a dispatcher, track warrants, and a fast clock. No car cards yet, though. To switch industries and towns, you just did what ever you liked. In the absence of anything else, just swap a car for a car was what I told the guys.

After about a year operating this way, I added car cards. By this time we had about 8 guys who knew the railroad almost as good as I did, and some of them started to volunteer trying dispatching. Before that, I was always the dispatcher.

Adding car cards is interesting because it's very easy to balance things out as you go.

For example, I would run one session and have things balanced great as to cars in trains, cars in staging, and cars at industries. Then next session the two turns (way freights) would be little more than caboose hops out of the yard ... so I'd add some more cars to the layout, put waybills in the car cards, and this would improve the balance.

Then maybe next session one of the local trains (SP called them Haulers) would be light so I'd pull a few cars out of a through train to compensate.

By adding cars here and there, and moving cars around by changing waybills, I find I can balance the layout operations nicely. But don't overdo it -- it's prototypical to be a bit light sometimes, and overloaded a bit at other times.

Welcome to the world of realistic operations! I know I'm hooked, and it's become my motivation for everything else I do in the hobby. If you want to see some reports of real op sessions, you can check out my web site forum at: http://mymemoirs.net/model-trains/forum/phpBB2/viewforum.php?f=13

I try to post monthly op session reports -- with photos -- of our op sessions.

Guest operator John Shore acts as Engineer on the Seagull West as it pulls into Roseburg, OR

[Anonymous]

Thanks to everyone for your response and suggestions!