A friend recently commented that model railroading is the predecessor to modern online "Role Playing Games". So be it. But, if you have a model railroad and you want to operate it "realistically," what is the "best" approach? Are we all searching to answer this question?
I have a large HO layout in the basement that takes 15 operators over about 15-20 hours of playing time to operate a prototype day of trains "realistically". I started out using hand written car cards and waybills, and graduated to computer-generated waybills, using a program called "Waybills" by Shenware Software. (about $50). I like the computer generated waybills because they're easier to read, I can put my SPINS numbers on each destination easily, they can have color codes for destination and railroad, and most people know how to use them. Our longest trains are in the range of 25-30 cars, which is a large handful of car cards to keep track of, but they all fit in a single car card box when needed (if you insert them upside down). Also, the program gives you access to all the locations on the OPSIG's industries database, and allows you to analyze the number of waybills you have set up for each shipper on the railroad, for balancing traffic. So far so good.
Joe Green has an approach where he has either himself or the train conductor sit down with the car cards and waybills and manually prepare a switchlist for the train crews. There is some additional realism to this, although it also creates extra paperwork (albeit "realistic").
As an experiment, I've recently set up JMRI ops for my N scale (4'x8') railroad and tried "building" train switchlists. There are a lot of features to this open-source program, so I'm still on the very steep part of the learning curve, but I will say it's fun.
It seems to me that the key to understand car routing is that there are two distinctly different types of cars - "captive" and "free". A captive car runs between, say, a mine and a mill, and doesn't get diverted someplace else - it just runs back and forth. A free car can be "confiscated" any time it is empty, and sent someplace to be loaded so that it can progress in the general direction of its "home" road. For captive cars, depending on the complexity of the layout, you don't need any paperwork at all, because it's obvious that the empty log cars go back to the log camps. For captive cars without open loads, you need a waybill or switchlist to know if the car is empty or loaded, but after that, again, the move is relatively obvious. But are you just running them back and forth, or do the cars need to be cleaned, and/or stored in a yard, between moves? I have a bunch of (captive) cement cars that move between Lonestar Cement in South Seattle and a dam site in Concrete, and their waybills only have two cycles. But should I add two more intermediate destinations, to a clean-out track and a holding yard? What about weighing the loaded car? That would make 5 cycles, which is hard to do with a 4 cycle waybill. What I do presently is to add a note "weigh at scale" to the loaded move, so the operators know to run it through the scale track before forwarding it on to Concrete. Another option would be to remove the waybill at Concrete and have the cars return back to Lonestar per an instruction written on the car card itself.
For free cars, in general, they arrive inbound with some kind of load, get emptied, and then either sent back empty to where they came from (staging), or confiscated to a local industry to be sent back loaded (to staging). This could be two moves, or three, or four, or more, depending on if they get stored at an empty car track in a yard, cleaned, or weighed after the second loading. I imagine that JMRI ops can take care of all of that, but I'm not far enough up the learning curve to discuss how. My car cards and waybills generally can handle these variations ok.
But not really, because the process of confiscating cars is done on the fly by railroad agents and clerks, and not prescribed on a waybill. It seems to me a better approach would be to remove the waybills after the car is unloaded, and give the yardmasters a stack of new waybills to insert in empty cars as they see fit, while they are switching the yard. But, would they do it? My experience as a model railroad yardmaster is that it's all you can do to keep up with the incoming and outgoing trains, without also making decisions about what to do with empties. Not to mention where to store them, since there are never enough yard tracks. I don't know. Maybe we'll try this and see what happens.
But to do this with JMRI on the fly would really be challenging. You could do it, though, because JMRI's "move" option allows the program to continuously update the status of the cars on your train as you move along your train's route. It would involve only building trains and switch moves "just in time", rather than printing them out before the session started. But someone would be tied to the computer during the op session, for sure. How many model railroaders come to op sessions wanting to be clerks?
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