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.