Now about creating the waybills:
Keep in mind this is for a one or two person layout. (Also take it with a grain of salt! This thing could be a total failure.:curse: )
After reading Brakie’s posts concerning shortlines, I decided that my railroad would work a 5 day per week schedule. I drew a table with each industry spur listed down the first column, which is 16 industry spurs, and put 6 more columns, 1 for the total number of cars to/from that spur in an average week, and then I put the days of the week at the top of the other columns. This gave me a 16 x 7 table.
I gave some thought to the average number of cars my railroad would handle in a week, and I figured maybe 60-70 cars, so for an average day, that would be 12-14 cars. These things will depend on the size of your layout, number of industries, max length of train, etc.
Looking at each industry, I decided how much traffic each spur should have. For instance, a spur with a little dinky industry may only get one car a week, while some huge industry might get 10 or 12 cars or more a week. I didn’t just do this by industry – I have several industries that have more than one spur. I broke it down by spur, for instance - my furniture factory has a spur for lumber coming in, and another spur for furniture going out.
Using the furniture factory as an example, I decided that a typical week would see 2 carloads of lumber on Monday, and 2 carloads of lumber on Thursday. I put those numbers in the appropriate boxes in the table. As for loads going out, I decided that the furniture shipping spur would need an empty boxcar for loading on Tuesday, and two empties on Friday. If you have a spur that gets loaded cars in, but also sends loads out from the same spur, then in the day column, you can write “2 in” or “out” to keep track of ins and outs. I continued this for the rest of the industries, making adjustments for each day, trying to keep the daily totals to around 12-14 per day. The furniture factory has a weekly total of 4 loads in and 3 loads out.
Really what we are doing here is developing a “relative percentage of cars to a particular industry” for the layout. We’re not necessarily confining certain traffic to certain days, although you could. Once we decide how many cars per week go to each industry, then we will multiply that number by 4 which will give us enough waybills for an entire month. For the furniture factory, this is 16 waybills for loads in and 12 waybills for loads out. Most of the lumber loads-in waybills to the furniture factory may be from the same supplier, but a few of them could be for special wood from somewhere else. The furniture-out waybills could go to all manner of different places, or perhaps almost all could go to the same place like a warehouse or furniture supplier. Do this for each industry.
This “month worth of waybills” will be placed in the interchange waybill box located at each end of the layout. I will seed the interchange boxes roughly in weekly order, mon, tu, wed, thurs, fri on and on for each week. This will keep a semblance of order so that each industry sees roughly the proper number of cars each week, while at the same time allowing some randomness in. We could do it with just one week of waybills, but I think things would become too predictable. By doing a month’s worth, you can include an occasional special car coming in, like a flatcar with a new machine to be installed in the furniture factory, or you could include a “slow” week for a particular factory by leaving out some cards for that week, or you could add extras for a “heavy” week.
When it is time for an operating session, just pull out the first however many cards you want to switch. Most likely it would be one day’s worth of cards, maybe 12. Understand that I am not just pulling cards at random from the box, I am pulling them from the front in the order I put them into the box. By pulling different numbers of cards at each session, this will mix things up a bit but not too much. You still want things to run sort of by the weekdays.
Between operating sessions, there are a few things to do. The car cards/waybills have to be cycled through the setout-hold-pickup boxes. Cars that got unloaded will have their waybills removed from the car card and placed at the back of the interchange waybill box. Loaded cars arriving in the interchange will have their waybills placed in the interchange box. The cars in the interchange will be removed and placed in the storage boxes. A new group of waybills will be picked from the front of the interchange waybill box and new cars will be pulled from the storage boxes and placed at the interchanges. Empty cars will be found for the industries needing empties. Again, these can come form the storage boxes at the interchange or they can be acquired from empties on the layout.
As I mentioned, once the system is set up, I am not aiming to run strictly by the day of the week. If you had another person and you wanted to run two trains, then just pull extra cards for two trains. Maybe each operating session always has three trains. Maybe you experiment with four trains.
Okay. Critique please? What am I leaving out or missing? Will this system work?