colored car tabs for yardmasters

At an op session last year, Kirk Reddie pointed out that it would be useful for yardmasters to have some type of temporary tags to place on top of cars to make classifying them easier (he said he got the idea from Pat Lana's layout in Colorado). The tags would not stay on the cars when they left the yard, just during the classification process. I liked this idea. Taking some measurements of typical roofwalks, it seemed that 5/16" Evergreen I-Beams would do a got job, so I bought some of them.

The next step was to paint each side of each strip a color corresponding to the waybill colors I use: Blue is north, Red is south, Yellow is UP, Orange is MILW, Green is Everett, White is Interbay, etc. Here are some beams being painted two shades of pink, to correspond with the two main districts in the Stacy St/Argo area:

Next is to cut the strips to 1/2" lengths. This length is short enough for them to fit in between hatch doors on top of my many ACF cement hopper cars. This was made quick and easy using the NWSL "Chopper" desktop tool:

Then, I sorted the various colored tabs to have an even distribution for each yardmaster:

And finally, I tried placing them on some cars in Everett, corresponding with the the waybills in their car card pockets:

You can see here that five of these cars need to be sent south (red, yellow and orange), without re-blocking, and one needs to be re-spotted in the Everett area (green). We're having op sessions here tomorrow and the next day, so we'll see if these tabs are used by anyone to help anyone. Stay tuned.