I run a waybill operating railroad based on Allen McClelland's V&O where each town/industry has a set of boxes labeled "Set Out", "Hold" and "Pick Up". Once cars are at the various industries with their respective waybill "advanced", everything runs smoothly. It's the
beginning of a train run that I'm having trouble with. I run point-to-point. I'll start with a west-bound engine and just pick up west-bound waybills, match them to cars and away we go. Problem here is that there doesn't seem to be any reason for the start up orders. I am considering make up a bunch of Train Order cards that would represent requests from industries for various needs...i.e., empty required, pick up empty, pick up load, request load (like they're waiting on an order) etc.
Does anybody out there operate like this? Or just how do you waybill operators run? And, if anybody out there
doesn't operate, follow this thread and I think you'll learn something
.
We use the car cards and waybills system at my club, and it works really well. It's a very flexible system, and very realistic when you use it right.
We use standard 4-cycle waybills. (Move 1: A to B. Move 2: B to C Move 3 etc.) One thing to keep in mind is you don't have to use all 4 "sides". Just use as many as you need to represent the shipment. For example, move 1 might be empty to Industry A. Move 2 might be load from industry A to industry B. Move 3 might be empty from Industry B to a storage yard or to staging. (or maybe B reloaded the car and sent it to industry C). You can represent pretty much any pattern or combination of patterns with waybills.
It's more flexible than a computer system too, as at a yard the yardmaster makes up the lists with what he has and forwards cars on other trains. (someone, I think brakie, brought up blocking. That's a good point, and if the yardmaster knows what he's doing he can have the switch crews block cars properly in the yard.)
Hold times can be built in too; we add a little "Hold x days" notation to some waybills. At some locations, we'll have card boxes for "Hold Day 1", "Hold Day 2" etc., or there's the tried and true "paperclip technique." For each day that a car has been held, you add a paperclip to the card. If the waybill says "Hold 3 days", when the car card has three paperclips attached to it, you take them off and turn the waybill to the next move.
Between operating sessions, we stage the layout. This involves:
1) turning waybills on all cars parked at industry spurs. Move them to "Pick up" boxes if necessary.
2) turn all the waybills on cars in trains. Some will be on their last move. Remove those waybills.
3) New car orders. We have a spreadsheet that simulates customer car orders. The spreadsheet generates a number of cars for each industry or traffic pool that we have. Basically, the spreadsheet has three things for each traffic item: a percent probability of occuring, a minimum and a maximum. For example, there might be:
Flatcars for Industry A 25 1 3
Which might say, there's a 25% chance of ordering cars for Industry A, if there's an order for A, it will be anywhere from 1 to 3 cars. This works extremely well in terms of providing a realistic appearing mix of traffic that varies slightly from session to session.
So let's say that the spreadsheet comes back and says to order two cars for A this session. I'll go and grab 2 waybills from my big stack of waybills for Industry A. (keep a large collection of waybills for each industry, more than you'll ever use at one time. These waybills can have different destinations too, to keep traffic varied.) So, with my 2 waybills I grabbed off the top of the Industry A stack, I'll match them to 2 appropriate cars in staging that don't have waybills. Once they're loaded at A, the next session (if they actually made it as far as A this session) they might go to destinations in opossite directions, or to the same destination depending on which waybills were pulled. This offers a good simulation of industries shipping to multiple customers.
4) once all the waybills are prepared, put the trains together (remember blocking!!!)
And you're pretty much set up for your session.