OK, I've been working on this for a while and think it might work great on my layout.
I want to generate rail traffic the way it happens in the real world...by customer demand. So, I created a set of cards, one for each of the 12 industries/ interchanges on my layout. I made doubles of each card so one represents a set out and the other a pick up. Shuffle the deck.
I use dice to add a degree of randomness to keep it interesting and varied. I roll one of the dice to determine how many industires will be served. Draw the number of industry cards indicated on the dice. If double cards appear that means I'll be both setting out and picking up cars at that site.
Using only one of the dice means I may roll a minimum of one industry which might be OK depending on the number of cars going there...or I'll roll again to add to the train. A maximum of six industries is plenty of action on my layout.
Once the industry cards are selected I'll roll dice again to determine how many cars are to be set out or picked up at each site. I ran into problems with this earlier because using dice that go up to six could create much larger trains than my layout can handle. I solved that problem by using "white out" to cover some of the dots to create a cube with only options for a 1, a 2, two 3s and two 4s. This works well since most of my industries don't accomodate more than four cars. The combined dice rolling could yeild a maximum of a 24 car train which is manageable for me. Probability suggests that most trains will be smaller.
Below is an example of an industry card.....
I want to generate rail traffic the way it happens in the real world...by customer demand. So, I created a set of cards, one for each of the 12 industries/ interchanges on my layout. I made doubles of each card so one represents a set out and the other a pick up. Shuffle the deck.
I use dice to add a degree of randomness to keep it interesting and varied. I roll one of the dice to determine how many industires will be served. Draw the number of industry cards indicated on the dice. If double cards appear that means I'll be both setting out and picking up cars at that site.
Using only one of the dice means I may roll a minimum of one industry which might be OK depending on the number of cars going there...or I'll roll again to add to the train. A maximum of six industries is plenty of action on my layout.
Once the industry cards are selected I'll roll dice again to determine how many cars are to be set out or picked up at each site. I ran into problems with this earlier because using dice that go up to six could create much larger trains than my layout can handle. I solved that problem by using "white out" to cover some of the dots to create a cube with only options for a 1, a 2, two 3s and two 4s. This works well since most of my industries don't accomodate more than four cars. The combined dice rolling could yeild a maximum of a 24 car train which is manageable for me. Probability suggests that most trains will be smaller.
Below is an example of an industry card.....
