marking the mainline with oil droppings

In my Pan Pastel collection today, I noticed a dark grey color (called Paynes Grey Extra Dark), and tried brushing it on the center of the mainline track in Everett's Bayside yard, with good results, shown in the photo below. The long train is in the siding, with the main track to the left of it. It makes the mainline look heavily traveled when compared with the adjacent yard tracks, which will help operators keep track of which track is which. Try it, you'll like it. I've definitely seen this done on other layouts. It's a nice subliminal clue to which track is the main track. Using an airbrush might be better, but not easier.

By the way, the first car in that train is one of the new Rapido NP boxcars, relettered for the BN, by Tim Taylor, using decals from the Northern Pacific Railway Historical Society. The prototype cars were used in MOW service and were painted solid brown, but we liked the NP heralds so much we just changed the reporting marks for 1973. I guess I should find another Pan Pastel color to fade those heralds way back. That is (should look like) an old car! Another day. First, I have to now put oil droppings on the rest of the mainline...

Bethlehem Steel Mill part 2 - first draft track plan & ops overview

Here's my first shot at designing the (1973 Bethlehem West Seattle) steel mill model and its operations. There will be many more drafts before we lock it down. The space I'm working with is roughly 3x8 feet with room for extending the mill yard to the left as much as needed. The large squares on the background paper are one foot square, so the small squares are 1/5 of a foot.

In 1973 there was not a continuous billet caster, so the liquid steel was moved by railcar from the furnace to the stripper building nearby, unlike today. This also may mean that the mill could make a larger variety of products than it does today, we'll have to find this out.

The basic operations are:
1. transfer trains from the Beth mill yard to the BN West Seattle yard and back
2. classifying those trains in the mill yard, both outbound and inbound
3. moving loaded hot ingot molds from the EAF to the stripper building, and returning empties
4. moving finished product (rebar, angles, etc) from the rolling mill to the shipping building (in gons)
5. moving finished product from the shipping building to the mill yard for transfer to BN
6. moving baghouse dust from the EAF to the mill yard for transfer to BN
7. moving limestone or dolomite up the ramp to the EAF holding tanks (in cov. hop.)
8. moving other additives to the additives yard (need to find out whether coke would have been shipped in by hopper cars in 1973, rather than bags as it is today)
9. moving scrap metals in from the mill yard to the scrap yard
10. moving empty cars in reverse of all of the above moves
11. moving the mill loco(s) in and out of the "roundhouse" building for maintenance
12. spotting empty gons on a storage track near the rolling mill to be staged for quick loading at the shipping building.
13. moving new electrodes in, and spent electrodes out, of the additives yard

This is all the moves I can think of so far, but let me know if you have ideas on this. For example,  there were probably various other supplies and machinery moves that aren't listed yet, to the various buildings in various types of cars. Also, where were the electrodes, dolomite, coke, scrap, and finished product shipped to and from?

Bethlehem Steel Mill West Seattle part 1 - east ladder overview

Well, you might as well get used to the idea that I'm going to add a model of this awesome steel mill to the West Seattle extension of my layout. It's going to take a while to figure out how to do it, though. We went on a tour of the plant last week, but they don't allow pictures, so the best I can do for the moment is share this overview image from Google Earth, we can get into details later. The Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) is in the upper right and the "Shipping Department" is in the upper left. One of the tracks in the middle has a steep incline and leads to a dolomite unloading pocket, but the rest of the tracks are at grade level. All the tracks pointing down and to the left lead to a dead end that's only about 5 cars long, so switching the plant is complex. All of the inputs and outputs shipped by rail go on a single track towards the upper right and over to a "mill yard" next to the BN's West Seattle yard next to T-5. My plan is to include a (condensed) model of the mill yard, so the plant switcher will be able to receive and deliver cuts of cars to the BN as a transfer move, and then sort them for delivery to this maze of plant spots.

I recently joined the "Steel Mill Modeler's Special Interest Group (SIG)" and received a batch of recent back issues of their quarterly magazine, so hopefully this will make my modeling better informed. What a fun project! It's well timed with Walthers' recent announcement that they're re-issuing their steel building and rolling stock series, but it's probably not going to do me much good, because this is a smaller mill than their models, and has a particularly constrained site. Also, they don't move any liquid steel by rail at this plant, so our switching will be limited to moving scrap, dolomite and other additives in, steel products from the rolling mill to the shipping building, and steel products from the shipping building to the outside world. That's enough, though.

We learned a lot on the tour that I will slowly try to document here. Most interesting to me was that they have an off-site scrap sorting yard at T-105 (nearby, more on that later), so the incoming scrap is mostly coming a short distance on the BN, and the longer distance scrap moves mostly terminate at T-105. Also, the high temperature bag house which filters the air above the furnace is so laden with iron particles that they ship it by rail to a facility in Montana which extracts the iron and ships it back to be put back in the furnace! You can't make this stuff up!

Steel on!

thoughts on CC&WB (car cars and waybills)

A friend asked me for my experience with operating systems and car cards and waybills in particular, so I ended up writing back the following long answer:

I started out with the Mirco-Mark (McFall) car card and waybill system and have pretty much stuck with it for many years. I now generate all my waybills using a computer program called “Waybills” by Shenandoah Software, which only runs on Windows, so I have to put my Mac into PC emulator mode ("Parallels" software) to use it. If I was starting out I might try to see if "JMRI ops” is up to the job of printing waybills, but if it isn’t I recommend the Shenandoah software. The advantage of it is that you can keep adding shippers and locations as your layout expands, and since each waybill has an ID number you can swap old ones out for new ones without disturbing the overall traffic flow. You can also use it to print car cards and locomotive cards, which I haven’t tried yet. I also use it to print “DCC settings” cards to go in my loco card pockets which describe the use of each DCC Function button for that particular locomotive and decoder type. This is not as much of an issue if you use only one type of decoder. I haven’t tried the other brands of software available for this, or tried to do it myself with a spreadsheet program, so can’t speak to them.

Another thing I like about car cards is that I keep all the acquisition date, prototype life span, model weight, manufacturer, date I acquired it, type of wheels and couplers, and dates when I make any modifications or maintenance on the car, handwritten on the back of the car card. So if I have to bad order it for any reason I can quickly see its medical history. You could keep all of this on a spreadsheet too, but I like being able to pick up a car and its car card at the workbench and be up to speed right away.

I have operated at probably 20 other layouts by now, and have been forced to use various types of switchlists and computer printouts in addition to the regular car cards and waybills. The challenge can be somewhat fun, but I find it much easier to keep track of which car cards are in which car card box corresponding to which track, rather than trying to understand a switchlist. Also, I really enjoy being able to understand (fantasize) the ultimate origin and destination of the car, not just what to do with it right now, as part of the whole “modeling” experience.

Another thing I like about car cards is, if I want to just go downstairs and do some switching, I can clip a paper clip to a few car cards around the layout, and then run an engine around and spot and pull just those cars, without disturbing the entire operating scheme. Much easier than getting a computer to “allow” that. (I use colored paper clips for this, which correspond to the color codes on my waybill destinations, so I can see at a glance what I’m dealing with.) And if you decide that a certain car should only have 3, or 6 or whatever destinations instead of the regular 4-cycles, it’s no problem - you can easily put more than one waybill in a car card. Another thing that some people do is to “confiscate” cars for a certain move, but inserting a special waybill in front of the normal waybill to redirect that car for a specific move. All of this is easy to do without any challenging computer programming. For example, say I wanted to run a special run of the “Ferndale Turn” of 50’ wide door boxcars up to the aluminum plant in Ferndale. I could print (or write out by hand) say 6 empty car orders and walk around the layout looking for empty boxcars, inserting the orders in each car card as I go. Suddenly the special “Fern Turn” is on its way. Micro-Mark sells blank “Empty Car Order” cards (in a blue color) as well as regular waybills, and they are easy to use for a purpose like this. Some people like this so much that they make all of their waybills only two-cycle (empty move and loaded move) and then remove them when the load is moved, allowing a completely different waybill to be inserted after each pair of moves for that car. I may move in that direction for some of my cars that aren’t in dedicated services like wood chips or aircraft parts. Some people are into more prototype-looking waybill designs, too, but I have the information I need on the existing waybills so am not motivated to make the process more challenging for operators who are used to the existing “convention”, so far at least. I’ve tried a couple of them, but they’re harder to understand at a glance. Tony Thompson’s blog is a great resource for information about this.

Another advantage of the 4-cycle set-up is that if you want to call for cleaning and weighing a car after its load has been delivered, you have the option of specifying that as a separate cycle or as a note at the bottom of a cycle. There have been some interesting articles written about reefers in this regard too, since they sometimes need to be pre-iced, or pre-cooled, or topped off after loading, etc, and this can be noted as one or more extra cycles on the waybill(s) for that car. It’s important to think about this now, because you may need to add some “clean-out tracks” and space for scale tracks if you want to include these operations in the fun of your layout.

If you are modeling the transition era, I don’t suppose there was anything like SPINS invented yet, so the numbering of tracks and spots can be whatever you want (or whatever the prototype did at the time). I tried to copy the BN SPINS document on my layout, although I modified them as needed, so every car spot has a unique six digit SPINS number, which is included on the waybill as well as trackside. Wherever possible I try to have the odd numbers trailing point and the even numbers facing point, and sequenced in order, so in theory blocking the trains is easy, for either the yardmasters or the switch crew, just by following the numbers. In practice, though, I haven’t had enough op sessions or enough regular operators for this to be much appreciated or even used. But it’s there. I also have every town color coded on the waybills so that you can tell at a glance which cars need to go in which train and/or direction. Most people do this and it is highly valued by crews.

It’s worth mentioning that Office Depot (etc.) sells 1/4” round “removable” sticky dots that many N scalers are using instead of car cards and waybills. You can have a different color for each town, and write a letter and/or number code for each industry/spot in that town inside the dot, stick it on top of the car, and you don’t have to bother reading the reporting marks on the car sides. You might consider trying this too, but I don’t have enough experience with it to be much help. One thing I do know is how important it is to make a clean layout diagram that clearly indicates which color refers to which town in which direction, for people who are new to the layout. I went to one (HO) layout using color tabs for car routing, and it took me most of the op session just to figure out and then remember which color referred to which town and/or direction. I’m about to try this on my own N scale layout, but am stuck at the stage of deciding what to call my towns and which colors to make them. All in good time.

Honestly, when I started building my railroad in 1985 I was just thinking about copying the trains moving in and out of Interbay and North Portal, which were my main rail fanning spots. Over time I realized that meant I could have two or three trains running at once, and a switcher in Interbay. Then DCC happened, which meant lots of operators could gum up even one yard. Then I tacked on Everett, which has two yards with different functions and Delta Wye to Skykomish and Bellingham, and suddenly I was looking at 8 operators or more. And then the expansion continued, both north and south, and now we have 7 yards and need 15 operators. And this is before adding the new West Seattle yard, which is now under construction and will take at least one additional operator. It wasn’t planned from the beginning, it just grew. The car cards and waybills always worked and are still working. I’m examining the many features of “JMRI ops”, but the thought of spending all my hobby time behind a computer screen is just making me wonder if we really need it.

Finally, if you are interested in ops, I highly recommend joining the NMRA opsSIG, which puts out an excellent quarterly magazine full of this type of information and sells a book called "A Compendium of Model Railroad Operations” which is worth reading.

SPINS diagrams for the Burrlington Northern

Here are images of the pages from the Burrlington Northern's current SPINS document. Its purpose is to provide each operator with complete information about the track layout of each town and the spot numbers for each industry that may be indicated on each car's waybill. Note that the waybill destinations are color coded to match the color codes on the overall layout schematic diagram (warmer colors to the south, colder colors to the north, and purple colors to the east). This document is an approximate copy of the prototype SPINS document, with the details changed to match my layout as needed.

Burrlington Northern debuts on MRH

Brian Pickering came over the other day and shot some footage on his RDC camera car, and then publisher Joe Fugate included it in the July 2019 edition of the Model Railroad Hobbyist (MRH) online magazine. The YouTube video is here. The quality isn't great because he was missing a cable and had to shoot the video on his cellphone of my TV monitor receiving a signal from his RDC camera car. It's still fun to watch, though. Someday we'll my camera train so you can access live video like this in real time from my website, but don't hold your breath...



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car "storage" underneath the MILW car barge

Ray Wheeler had the great idea that railroads sometimes lost track of cars, and in particular that one or more might have fallen off the MILW car barge during loading and never been "reported". I found this amusing, and since the "water" underneath my car barge is removable, tried it out:

The basic idea is great! A number of details could be improved. For example, I don't like seeing the Kadee coupler trip pin so visible. Also, the alignment of the car doesn't make too much sense. This would be a great opportunity for exposing a model with a super-detailed underbody, placed parallel to the side of the barge. Using scale width wheels would be good here too, so it doesn't look so much like a working model. And possibly spraying it with a textured barnacle color. What are your ideas?