A friend recently asked for "my thoughts about making waybills" to insert in car cards. I wrote him a long reply, and I've reprinted it here, in case it's useful:
The main thing is to do it gradually, one at a time. I've been really surprised at how long it takes me to do a good waybill. I always think I can bang some out in 10 minutes, and 45 minutes later, I'm still at it.
I'm using a PC program called "Shenware" to print my waybills, but Todd VonStup likes "SwitchIt" and Bill Sornsin does them on an Excel spreadsheet that he got from someone. There's nothing wrong with handwriting the MicroMark ones, either. I've done a lot of that. Of course, Tony Thompson's blog is full of how to make your waybills more "realistic", and I used his template to make a few up, and they are cool, too, but I haven't gotten around to doing more of them. It's a whole sub-hobby, I guess you could say. (BTW, I heard that Shenware was sold to MRH, but I haven't heard if they plan to release it again. I don't believe it's currently available)
So, just for starters, let's jump into these three photos for a minute.
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| Burr's waybills, photo 1 |
Photo 1 is the only photo that shows both sides of one of these 4-cycle waybills. But there are lots of my waybills printed on one side only and used simply as out-and-back "captive" moves. Especially for my cement hoppers - they just move loaded from Lonestar out to somewhere and then back in again empty. You could do that with your whole railroad and nobody would notice. So these first two images for an auto-rack (FA in the upper left-hand corner) show it moving to Pier 91's "autorack loading" (SPINS 128101 (Interbay is zone 12, Pier 91 is track 81, and the first spot on that track is 01, hence SPINS 128101)(note that this is triple information redundancy - the top of the waybill color is white, meaning it goes to Interbay, the text says Autorack loading, and the SPINS number is the specific location, if you want to have your brain work like an early computer).
Where was I? Oh, so I was being clever and wanted to split the auto business fairly between GM and Ford, so I have cycle one coming in from Pittsburgh with autos, cycle two going back to Pittsburgh, cycle coming back in from Ford in Detroit, and cycle 4 going back to Detroit. Three problems with this. (1) I was in such a hurry I didn't pay any attention to the fact that Pittsburgh was the body stamping plant, not the final assembly plant (as far as I know), so that waybill cycle should be on an auto-parts boxcar to an assembly plant in Seattle, which there wasn't one of, (2) Pier 91 was actually a Datsun importing operation, not a receiving yard for autos from Detroit, so the westbound cars should be empty and eastbound loaded, and (3) unloading and re-loading HO scale autos from an open auto-rack car is, believe me, something you only do once or twice, so you really need your waybills to keep the darn things either empty or loaded, which this waybill does not do. The third waybill in this photo is a regular bulkhead flat (FB) two-cycle waybill moving lumber to LA and back empty to BC. I have a lot of these, and lumber loads are easy to put on and off, and look great.
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| Burr's waybills, photo 2 |
Photo 2 starts with a similar FB (bulkhead flatcar) waybill which easily could be the back side of the previous one (in photo 1). This way my FB's alternate between heading south or heading east, creating some variety in moves. Then there is the FL (log bunk) loaded with logs from the CW (Chehalis Western RR) heading to Everett's Mill B (if that ever happened, which I doubt), and then on up to the Darrington Branch for more logs, which also come back loaded (on the other side of the waybill) to Mill B. The third waybill illustrates something I do a lot, which is to have cycle one be an empty car order from "anywhere", in this case then headed to Ballard, and cycle two sends it to California loaded with cement. The nice thing about starting out with an empty car order from anywhere, is when you are restaging the layout after operations, if you find a car in the wrong place, instead of moving it, you can flip the waybill back to the "from anywhere" cycle and the next crew will get it going to the right place.
This brings up an important point. Randomness. Paul Scoles set up his waybills and op sessions to complete a single cycle for all cars. Meaning that at the beginning of the session all waybills were on cycle 1, say, and at the end of the session all cars had been delivered. Then he would flip all the waybills on the layout, and the next op session would start out with all cars on cycle 2. He thought this was terrific, because if anyone knocked their car cards on the floor by accident, it would be easy enough to pick them up and put the waybills back in the pocket on the correct cycle. However, I didn't want to do it that way. Each car moves toward its destination via a series of switching moves and trains, and when a particular car reaches its final destination depends on how many operators are available for a particular op session, and many other factors. If somebody spills their car cards on the floor, so be it. The train itself should always be in blocking order, so it shouldn't be too hard to put the deck back together. I can have an op session by myself, or with 16 operators, or anything in between. When the cars reach their destination, we can leave them there until the next session. Or longer. Eventually we flip the waybills. It's random, and feels pretty realistic.
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| Burr's waybills, photo 3 |
OK, back to the last photo, number 3. The TA (tank car) waybill shows some shippers that I got from the OPSIG database, or maybe from one of the "Rails Unlimited" Shippers Guides that he sells online, and it makes me happy that it "could have" been a real move. But nobody else cares. All they want to know is where the damn thing goes on the layout. Eastbound staging? Southbound? Which train should it be in? The layout owner is the only one analyzing if the moves are realistic.
On the real BN, there were trains to Portland that interchanged with the SP (Southern Pacific), and trains to Wishram that went on the Inside Gateway to the Santa Fe. Very different set of waybills, right? But, unlike Bill Sornsin, I don't have enough room in my Interbay and Stacy St yards to make up two different southbound trains. Sad, but true. So, all the southbound waybills show the red south staging color, and nobody cares about the two totally different manifests that took place on the prototype. Maybe if you were here, being the Stacy St. yardmaster, you would get a kick out of re-blocking all the red waybilled cars to the two different trains, but more likely you would be too busy with everything else going on there to enjoy that.
OK, back to the last photo, number 3. The FB waybill illustrates a couple of things. One is the empty car order, as we already discussed. The second is the light blue second bar on cycle 2, showing that I'm trying to get this car routed on the "Fern Turn" train instead of any other northbound train that would normally pick up a blue waybilled car like this. (This hasn't really worked. Visiting operators and just too busy with first-level sorting, and, again, there aren't really enough tracks available, to keep track of which train to put cars on, beyond the obvious bold color schemes. But, I'm not giving up on this. I'm thinking about putting the name of the train type on each waybill, to help future yardmasters do their job. But it may or may not help. We'll see.) The FM waybill shows my approach to interchanging to the UP (Union Pacific). In this case, I have a Seattle lumberyard that was only served by UP switchers as a destination, so the car needs to be interchanged to the UP at Argo. But since the destination is Seattle, it won't go off to staging on a UP southbound train to Black River Jct. It will just stay in Argo and have its waybill flipped at the next session. Also note that it is supposed to be weighed. Right. I have a cool electronic weigh station at Stacy St. on yard track 8, right in front. It's been used twice, that I know of. It would be an unusual visiting yardmaster who would have any idea of what they were doing in that yard, let alone weighing a car and writing down the weight in that space provided on the waybill. Like I said, it has happened twice. Cool, though. Also note, on cycle 1 it shows a comment "UP car". So I can try to have UP cars get used for shipping to UP destinations.
That's a start on my ideas about waybills. I hope you find it worth reading! Just write out a few waybills and try switching with them, and see how it goes. I had hundreds of hand-written waybills in service long before I ever changed over to a computer-based system.
(If you look at the OPSIG YouTube channel, Eric Smith has a video on how to use "car order" card systems for car forwarding, which you might enjoy considering. I set it up for my N scale layout and am trying it out. There aren't car cards, only car order cards, and those car order cards stay at each town, rather than moving with the train. It basically keeps track of which types of cars should be spotted or pulled at each industry spot, without caring about the reporting marks. Ideal for N scale, so you don't have to read car numbers.)
One last thing. On the prototype, at the local level, inbound loads are handled differently than outbound loads. For outbound loads, an empty car order brings a car to a shipper (cycle 1), and the loaded car goes far away (cycle 2). Done. For inbound loads, the car comes in from far away and gets spotted at the local shipper (cycle 1), and then it gets picked up and stored empty at a local yard until further notice (cycle 2). Eventually it gets an empty car order and either gets sent to a local shipper for loading (cycle 3) and then sent loaded to an offline shipper (cycle 4), or sent offline right away to a distant shipper (cycle 3). So, I have a variety of 2, 3 and 4 cycle waybills, accordingly. What I've found in practice, though, is that I don't have enough room in any of the yards to afford an "empty car track" for a lot of empty cars to be just hanging around. So when re-staging I tend to advance the waybills calling for local storage on an empty car track by two waybill cycles and get them back out to staging. Another example of the "unintended consequences of trying to imitate the prototype too faithfully." (That would make a great clinic!).
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