New yard tracks on the Somerville & St. Francis River

[dunnyrail]

Some lovely Moggies on here.

Gav,
Must be good to have a new Switching Yard, just what is needed to make the Operations more efficient.

Do you use Card Waybills? I am thinking of using them for my line, but up to now all the Wagons are moved after having been Random Ordered by playing Cards on Shunt Lists. This works OK but does mean a lot of prep prior to an Operating Day. Plus I have to think about how I will deal with things if I get a good team that can run through 2 Timetable Routines in a day! With Cards a quick run round the line whilst the operators are having Tea / Beer and the next session would be ready to go.

A Dispatchers and Superintendents life is a tough one.
JonD

 

[supagav]

Mike, that fellow is lovely! Beautiful cat

Jon:

We are sort of in the same boat to be honest! I suggested that we started out using card waybills from Micromark:

http://www.micromark.com/car-routing-system-starter-pack,8282.html

We got a set of these and the wooden boxes, although with use we found that these were a lot of work as you say. They are very good but sometimes the extra preparation is a chore. Since then we decided to simplify things a little. We now use a system of timetable and switchlists to keep things managable and interesting.

Our timetable is used as a rough outline of what traffic would move over our line in the space of one day for example. Our railroad is after all a branchline so it is highly unlikely to see any 1st class streamliners rolling through! We settled on a few local switching/shunting jobs per day in each direction, augmented by a couple of small light passenger services which would also carry head-end freight and reefers behind the locomotive (an AM and a PM service so far). This allowed us to picture each specific job within a bigger picture.

After that, each switch job is given a switch list, which clearly outlines all the pickups and setouts at each town. This is ordered sequentially on paper to follow the route of the train, and also specifies which loco and caboose should be used the run.

This seems to work quite well for our needs although I must admit that we are still experimenting!

I'm currently looking at some programs to do this for us. The first is Ship-It which I read about on a US forum:

http://www.albionsoftware.com/index.html

This allows you to put in all the data, cars, locos, towns, yards etc, as well as the commodities moved over the railroad, and it will provide all the necessary paperwork for you. The nice thing is that every session generated is one day, so the next time you generate a session, it will still be the following day on the railway! I set the date in 1966, so all the paperwork appears as if from that time! It does however take a bit of time to tweak and set up as it is essentially a database program, and you must understand the logic of the software to get the results you are looking for.

If you are interested I would be more than happy to share our findings with all this

 

[supagav]

For me though, the way we like to keep things more interesting (and more challenging for those who are already up to speed), is to place more emphasis on the relevant rules and to try and think about the basic ways in which real crews used locomotives.

For example, if you just shuttle around moving things about then one person can do this alone. If instead you insist that operators try to use the correct prototypical horn and bell sounds and all the right headlight controls, then suddenly this becomes a lot more challenging and requires a two man crew. The engineer must focus on controlling the loco prototypically and must leave the moves to someone else. Also thinking about scale speed can help too, different speeds over different areas of the line (eg: in a yard limit area) can help to keep crews focused.

For us, the guy with the Navigator, like the prototype US Engineer, is only ever in control of the engine, not the train! The conductor tells him where to go and what to switch. We use a second man as a Conductor/Switchman who has the lists, as well as a plan of the garden showing all the point locations (and their DCC numbers!) on a clipboard, so he tells the engineer where to go and how he wants things done. The engineer instead focuses on moving the engine prototypically, eg: sounding the bell or horn in the correct way before moving off, different horn toots for a change of direction, proper bell/horn sounds at road crossings, using any special light functions like oscillating headlights correctly too. We disabled all the automatic functions of our sound units so that the horn and bell will only work manually under DCC. All these things have really helped improve our sessions as we can get more into the real feel of it all, whilst working in pairs avoids feeling completely swamped by detail!