Monday, July 27, 2020

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!



2 comments:

  1. Constructive placement means that the car was available to spot, but wasn't spotted, its not necessarily the customer's "fault". If the customer orders cars in to be spotted by car number then those cars not ordered in will be CP'd. Once a car is CP'd then the railroad can charge a switch charge to spot the car. If the car is not a private car on private/leased track, then the demurrage clock starts when the car is CP'd. "Off spot" is not a "real" status, per se. It just means the car isn't at destination. It can be "off spot" and CP'd. For model purposes you can, off course, have them mean whatever supports your operations.

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  2. Thanks Dave. This makes me think that, for model purposes, one form might be sufficient, simply to encourage operators to re-spot any off-spot cars. Since we're not keeping track of demurrage charges. (not that someone couldn't come up with an Arduino application for that, too!)

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