Friday, September 18, 2020

The profound difference between a Timetable and an Operating Plan



I just found out something truly profound from ex-BN employee Bob Stafford (and after digesting articles in the OPSIG magazine “the Dispatcher’s Office”). The official Timetables only contained the official “schedules” that could be used by dispatchers to reduce the number of train orders that needed to be written, to improve safety, in the days before radios were widely used. There weren’t very many schedules listed in the timetables, by my modeled era of the early 1970's. But there were lots of (extra) trains that ran at the same time, with the same purpose, each day. Each train had a “Train Brief (TB)” - a document that listed which blocks of cars would be switched in and/or out at each station along the route, and the estimated time at each station. This TB was followed every day that train was run, until it was changed. All of the TB’s together constituted the “Operating Plan” (OP), which was distributed to all stations in the district, and available to operators, yardmasters, etc. to know what to plan for all day. (on the Santa Fe the OP was called the Train Service Plan (TSP)). In my era, every 4 hours the dispatcher, after consulting with the train master, would issue updates to the OP to each station operator, who would make up, or revise, the “lineups” to give to the yardmasters, engine foremen, etc.



The reason this is profound, is because it makes clear that, for yardmasters at least, the “Timetable” is actually a document of secondary importance to the OP. What I call “train instruction cards” on my layout (see photo shown above) are actually summaries of a more detailed Train Brief, and what I call a “lineup of trains” is actually more of a sequential list of trains I would like to run, but mostly without meaningful departure or arrival times, or blocking information. I don’t even bother with a “Timetable”, because only the passenger trains used it, by 1973, so I just put their official times in their train instruction cards. But I am sadly missing the entire point, which is to have a master Operating Plan, which lists which trains are going to set out which blocks, where and when. Without this, it is basically chaos. It doesn’t matter if on a particular day the blocks themselves are 10 cars long or empty. The point is that everyone knows what time to expect what to happen, whether or not (mostly not) a train will use a particular "schedule" in the official "Timetable." If a train is “late”, it usually is in reference to the OP, not the Timetable, unless that train is using a schedule listed on the Timetable.

The larger context of Bob’s comments to me about my Interbay Switching video, is that in a real yard, the yardmaster can plan ahead for many hours which track he is going to use for which blocks. On a model yard, without an OP and/or lineup, along with copies of the Train Briefs, the yardmaster is just dealing with one emergency after another.

The following diagram is a graphic that the late Doug Walters designed for my layout to help yardmasters figure out which blocks could be placed on which trains. Now I can see that this information should also be part of my "train instruction form", and should be available to the dispatcher in some form as well, as part of a coherent "Operating Plan". Almost regardless of whatever schedules are shown on the official "Timetable".



Monday, September 14, 2020

More thoughts on car cards, switchlists, and computer-based car forwarding




Here's a summary of my current thinking about freight car routing on model railroads, in case it’s useful:

Using the 4 cycle waybills, as I do, I came to realize that there really are only two ways to use all 4 cycles that make sense: 

Variation one: Cycle 1 - car arrives from staging loaded for an online destination; Cycle 2 - unloaded mty car moves to a nearby yard’s “mty track”; Cycle 3 - mty car moves to an online shipper to be loaded, and; Cycle 4 - loaded car moves from online shipper to staging. In staging, flip the waybill back to Cycle 1 or remove it and replace with another waybill, and replace the open load if appropriate. 

Variation two: Cycle 1 - car arrives from staging mty and goes to an online shipper; Cycle 2 - car moves loaded to staging; Cycle 3 - mty car returns from staging to a different or same online shipper; Cycle 4 - loaded car moves from online shipper to staging. In other words, with outbound loads, you can have two per waybill card because the mty car processing is being done offline, but for inbound loads you can only get one trip to/from staging for each waybill card.

Another way to put this is, for outbound loads you can have two trips to staging per waybill card, but for inbound loads you are stuck messing around with the mty car, so you can get only one trip to staging per waybill card. On my layout I have a lot of 2 cycle waybill cards for “captive loads” such as specialized tank cars or cement hoppers, and also a number of 3 cycle waybill cards that just come in loaded to one shipper, go over mty to another shipper, and then out to staging loaded, skipping the mty track in the yard. That’s mainly because I don’t have much space in any of my yards for mty cars to sit around, but on a larger layout you can, of course, provide for that, as well as clean-out tracks.

But the next level down from the above, is what I have heard called “car card inserts” placed in front of the waybill. You could have a special insert for weighing the car. Another one for inspecting an mty that was just unloaded. Another one for holding on the mty track for an upcoming move. Another one for icing the reefer. Another one for deep cleaning a box or tank car. You could run around between sessions and randomly insert these cards into appropriate cars and then let the yardmasters deal with it.

The next level down is what Mark Dance does on his (amazing) N scale layout. He has some car tabs with numbers on them indicating which part of the hour the car can be released (actually, he uses them for locomotive servicing, but it’s the same idea for car cleaning, etc.) You put a car on the cleaning track, look at the clock, and then put a tab on the car indicating which part of the hour it will be when the cleaning is finished. (his tabs say :15, :30, :45, and :00, but you could use other divisions) This way the yardmaster has to wait a certain amount of time before moving the car, creating some additional play value.

I use a computer program called “Waybills” by Shenware to generate my 4 (or less) cycle waybills, which I like because (1) it has the OPSIG database of shippers built into it for picking offline origins/destinations, and (2) it can generate various reports so you can see how many waybills are going to which shippers with which loads on which cycles, for example. But the rest of it I’m keeping manual. If I want a switchlist, I would do like a conductor or clerk, and take my stack of car cards and write out a switchlist with that information. This is what Joe Green does in Sequim, and it works well.

I’ve been fooling around with JMRI ops on my N scale railroad, and have operated recently on layouts in this area that use the “RROPS” free switchlist generating program or JMRI ops, and, while they have some good features, I’m skeptical that they would be worth using for a large layout. You would spend all your time, as you said, reconciling actual car locations with what the computer thinks is going on. Using paper waybills and car card boxes (1) is something like how the real clerks did it, and (2) keeps everything visible on the layout in front of you, and not hidden somewhere in a computer chip. I may be wrong. It’s possible that graduating to a computer switchlist system is inevitable “progress”, but I’m not there yet. And at this point, based on what I’ve experienced elsewhere, I don’t want to go there. We’ll see what happens.

One last point. I’ve heard people say they “don’t like handling a stack of waybills” and would “rather run trains”. As is often said, we are cramming 5 or 10 employee jobs into a single model railroad “operator”. If they don’t like handling a stack of waybills, let them be the engineer of a two-person crew, working with someone like me who does enjoy handling a stack of waybills and figuring things out. There’s plenty of room on a large layout for differing operator job preferences.