Forms for "off-spot" vs. "constructive placement"

To simplify and recap a number of discussions that I've been having with railroaders and model railroaders, of various eras, there are basically two ways to make a mistake delivering a car - the railroad's fault or the customer's fault. Beyond that is a lot of detail about types of customers, prior agreements between the railroad and the customer, railroad specific practices, etc. But I wanted a simple and fun way to introduce this basic difference into my operating sessions (if they every happen again!). So I drafted these two colored inserts, to use whenever I become aware that a car is not where it's supposed to be, after (or perhaps during) an operating session. Here is a photo of my two forms:

I'm interested in any comments you might have about these forms, or suggestions for improvement. I printed the off-spot form on salmon stock to flag its urgency, and the constructive placement form on yellow to indicate caution but not as much as for off-spot.

If you want a refresher on this whole topic ("refresher" might not be the right word!), you can read my previous blog post that laid it bare ("bare" might not be the right word, either.). 

In the meantime, I finally finished re-staging the railroad from the previous op session, and caught myself admiring the lineup of westbound trains at Skykomish staging, ready to pounce. I can't seem to get tired of this particular view of the railroad. You're lookin at 20 or 30 thousand horsepower right there!

Helicon Focus at last!

Lee Marsh tipped me off to how easy it is to use Helicon Focus, and I watched several NMRAx presentations on model railroad photography this week, so I finally bit the bullet and produced my first photo using Helicon Focus and Photoshop. This is the view from the Dravus Street bridge over Interbay Yard, looking south towards downtown Seattle. Classification tracks on the right, arrival/departure tracks on the left. Helicon Focus smashed about 10 photos together to get the whole shot in focus, and then I used Photoshop to erase the overhead deck (that you can see is still causing a shadow on the backdrop). The photos were taken with a Pentax K200D DSLR at f/13 and ISO 800, using layout halogen and florescent layout lights and one LED fill light to the right of the switch engine, so you could see its brakeman.

The chevy on the bridge is just like one my Uncle Fletcher drove (well into the '70's) (same color, even!), so I left it in the picture. The railroad cars in the yard are standing just as they were left after the last op session on 13 March 2020, just before the Covid lockdowns. All I did was add locomotives to the cut on the A track, and position that train to hide enough of the green BN center flow hopper car so you can't see the warped walkway on top. And I turned the DCC power on, for the headlight on the switch engine.

See if you can find (at least) one glaring mistake in the photo. I know I can! But, in my defense, I was in a big hurry to try testing my newfound software and skills, so I didn't take the time to set up the shot properly. For example, it's a shame to have the running gear on the F-units obscured by boxcar roofs.

Thanks to Lee for all his coaching, and to NMRAx. Now I'm sliding down yet another "slippery slope" in model railroading fun...

Which do you prefer - Switchlists or Waybills?

What does it take to make up a meaningful train?

(1) someplace to go (a layout)

(2) something that needs to go there (train cars)

(3) power (locomotives)

(4) crew (conductor, engineer, switchpersons, and cabooses)

(5) an operating plan (trainmaster, yardmasters, etc.)

(6) safety (dispatcher, schedules, permission to occupy track, rules, etc.)

(7) money to pay for it all (waybills, billing clerks, etc).

You knew all this. I've been thinking about the long-running feud in model railroading about which is better, switchlists or waybills (often handled as inserts into car cards, but not always). And I've decided that the reason it's hard to decide, is it depends on whose job you enjoy doing the most. If you enjoy getting out on the road and banging cars around, it's easier to have a switchlist tell you what goes where. (Assuming you can read and understand the switchlist, something I often have great trouble doing when I attend an op session)(See an example below). If you're a "why" person like me, you like to understand why you're moving those cars in that train, and you kind of enjoy the job the conductor has of trying to figure out which cars to deliver to which customers in which order. With a switchlist, you just get told what to do, and check things off with a pencil as you go. With car cards and waybills, you get to keep sorting them and organizing them and blocking your train accordingly as you go.

One of the frustrating things about computerized switchlist programs like JMRI ops is that they don't have the ability to block (order) cars in staging (as far as I know). They may give you the cars in the same order as they went in, or they may not, depending on how the previous crew blocked that train. But there you are, at the beginning of a run, with a train full of cars in a certain order accompanied by a switchlist with the cars in a different order. I don't find that fun to deal with. If I can sort the car cards in the same order as they are standing in the train, I find that fun.

When I re-stage the railroad between op sessions, I manually (by hand or with a locomotive, depending on how much time I have or fun I'm in the mood for) re-block the cars in the train (after flipping the waybills to their next destination) so that the operator of that train will receive it blocked like it would have been blocked by the yardmaster at the yard that train is coming from. (See an example of a blocked train in the photo above). I would be happy to have a computer do all that, but how is a computer going to pick up and re-order cars in my staging yards? Not to mention, what about the adding or removing of "live loads" such as lumber on flatcars, or ore in hopper cars?

So, I'm kind of stuck in my position on this question. As an operator of a train, I like to make my own decisions about how to prepare and execute my switching moves, like a conductor would do, not just have it handed to me on a switchlist. And as a layout owner, I like to give my operators trains that are set up in the right order, to make their (often quite complex) jobs as enjoyable as possible.

Another factor to consider is that railroad practices evolved from totally manual paperwork to computerized paperwork, during the 60's and 70's. So my glorified view of how fun the conductor's job was changing during the period I model, 1973. Therefore, if I have the conductor make up a switchlist based on car cards/waybills, or use a computer program like JMRI to generate switchlists and track cars, both would be "prototypical" in a sense.

I might be missing something. Maybe I haven't had enough experience operating with switchlists. What do you think about this long-standing debate?