A Couple of Operations

I offered my layout for an end of year get together. As I prefer to run trains for a reason, I set up an operating session. 

One thing that I have learned is that operating a layout slows down construction.

The session often starts with a briefing. This is generally to introduce the throttles and how to use them to select and deselect locos and to remind the operators of some certain rules and procedures.

Every train has a card. It gives the operator instructions of where to pick up their train and what type of loco that they should use. These instructions are pretty explicit. While I know what to do, as it's my layout, my operators don't. They haven't had hours running trains as I have to work out where things should go. These cards are A5 in size. I also have A5 clipboard with the map of the layout on the back. I have found that no one seems to look at this.

When the instructions are finished, these cards are put in the "Completed Trains" box and a new train card is taken from another box. These cards are put in with some sort of sequence which makes sense for a day on the railway.

I use car cards and waybills for my wagons. I downloaded an Excel file a few years ago. The file prints your car cards and has cards for locos as well. I also used the spreadsheet to create car cards for my coaching stock so that they can be tracked and located on the layout as the goods wagons are. Some carriage cars are individual cars but if they are in a fixed set, such as a HUB set then only one card is created.

The same file also produces 4 position waybills as well. This worked pretty well in the past. I have simplified it over the years. I found out though that the operators working in the main yard didn't have the same fictitious geography awareness that I had. This made it difficult when they had to make up trains.

After watching numerous YouTube clips on operations, I found an example where the waybills were colour coded depending upon which town they were being delivered to. This was a brilliant idea. Even better was that they were available to download. These were created using a Powerpoint slide. While it isn't as sophisticated as the Excel spreadsheet, everything is on one slide. After making changes, I print the sheet cut out the waybill, fold it in half and stick it into the card card.

I used this change in the waybills to do some serious planning of traffic movement of my goods rolling stock. For example: Bega has a goods shed and wagons visit it from all over the layout as well as the network. The goods shed holds four bogie vans. I wrote down the the number of vans that I though that I would need. With four position waybills, I figured that I'd need at the most 16 different vans. I managed to cut this down as the destinations of each wagon was planned across the four positions. The planning was nothing more than four columns in an exercise book. These were entered onto another page if they were going to Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra so that I didn't have too many wagons going to each off layout destination. Some of the destinations were made up. For example, I don't think that Canberra has an Oak Dairy but I needed a destination for my Oak Milk tankers. My Dairy Farmers tankers go to Bega Cheese.

This old school method is labour intensive but I reckon that I have something that works. And with each destination framed inside a colour coded box, whoever is working the yard can assemble trains more easily. This worked well so the effort in the lead up was worth it.

The idea of the operating sessions is that we don't need to get through every train in the session. Next time we just pick up where we left off. I can also run trains in between sessions as well.

The first operating session was followed up with another mate a week later. A couple of pre-sorted trains from the previous session were dispatched from the yard to on layout destinations. I used a Eureka 50 class to take a train to Awdry. I have fitted a KD to the front so that I can shunt trains here and bring them back without needing to travel around the layout to turn the loco. As I was shunting the oil depot I found that an old point that I had used was causing problems for the leading bogie. That's probably why it was still in the box. The two set track points in the oil depot were causing problems too. The 50 class doesn't like the set track points.

Below is the work that needs to be carried out to make Awdry yard more user friendly for the 50 class.

Until next time, have a Merry Christmas.