Operations Part 2 Some Paperwork

I'm an operator. My trains need some sort of purpose. Wagons moving on the layout need to have a reason to be there. Even as a teenager with my British trains, I had some sort of paperwork. These were simple cards with the wagon name and number and a fictional destination. Most destinations were off the layout. 

When I started modelling NSW trains something similar was used. I also rolled a dice so that there was some randomness to how many wagons I needed for certain industries. I didn't have car card boxes but wooden pegs blu-taced (I'm sure that's a word) to the layout to hold my small cards, handwritten on small steel blue bits of cardboard that I have scrounged from somewhere. The ideas came from several articles from the Australian Model Railway Magazine over the years.

I can handle trains wandering aimlessly around the layout - it is sometimes truly blissful.

But... shunting is just plain fun.

I've built a couple of layouts with Inglenook shunting puzzles in them. So that I knew what to put where, I created some shunting lists. I still have them somewhere and when I needed to change from bogie wagons to four wheel wagons, it was a simple process.

For the last few layouts I have been using car cards and way bills. The waybills have been getting simpler and more user friendly over the years as I have guests operating the layouts. The car cards clipped together becomes the crew's paperwork.

I've considered 'switch lists' for the crews to fill out and created my own version of an X2010 form used by real train crews. I found an image online to help me out and it was put together using Word. I print it on A5 paper for small clipboards. Here it is:

I have found this useful when running by myself as I don't have to juggle cards. I showed this to one of my operators who thought that it would be good.

Then I found out about JMRI Operations Pro. I subscribe to trains.com, which about a week ago posted a video about using Operations Pro. It's part of the JMRI package which I download with Decoder Pro. I didn't know that I already had it. I followed the tutorial on trains.com and that got me started.

I spoke to the same operator about how marvellous this program is and that it would get rid of car cards. He seemed a little hesitant.

I entered in my container wagons. I have recently reduced them to 15 from 23 or more. In the last post I wrote about the GME wagons on a dedicated pathway from the harbour to the container depot and back again. I haven't quite worked out how to make that happen. I have however worked out how to take 9 wagons from Boydtown Yard to Junction Yard and then only 6 to Billabong Marina.

I had a lot of help from SoCal Scale Models on YouTube. Check out his video here and then subscribe to his channel. He will explain it better than I will here.

The trick is all about "movements". I had 9 wagons entering the yard from two trains. The default number of movements is 5, which means 5 wagons will be added to the train. I was getting four left behind every time. Once that was fixed, I wanted to park them all at Junction Yard and pick up the six already there. I need 9 movements to drop off and 6 movements to pick up. I can now take 9 wagons to Junction Yard but JMRI has me consistently dropping 5 and picking up 2. I still leave for Billabong Marina with 6 container wagons and need 6 movements to set out all the wagons.

It's the reverse on the way back. Something that I have found interesting is that out of the 15 wagons, only 11 or 12 are used for each journey. On one return journey, one lonely ICX wagon didn't move at all.

This is what the operator gets:

The crew receive their manifest for the job. The train is T005. T is for Trip working. 005 is the fifth trip working on the line. It is an odd number as travelling from Billabong Marina to Boydtown is in a down direction from Sydney. The train to the port is T004. It may be renumbered later when schedules are sorted out. I had to come up with a numbering system based on the real thing.

The crew assemble the train leave with all six wagons.

When they get to Junction Yard, they drop off 2 and pick up 5. Not all of the wagons in the yard are leaving but we leave with 9 wagons for Boydtown Yard. In theory, four will leave for Canberra and five will leave for Melbourne. I think it may depend on which order they are built.

When a train arrives and has been shunted, the train needs to be terminated in JMRI and the wagon locations are stored in the software and ready to be built into a new train.

While it isn't what I had planned, there is some sense of randomness about which wagons are used. I makes it a little more interesting.

At the moment, there are only 9 cars in the yard so everything is working well. Hopefully I'll add some more cars this week.

Until next time.

Operations Part 1

I don't know how many parts there are going to be in this. So let's start with part one. I'm sure that it'll be interrupted by other topics.

So... Covid finally got me. The next day after my last post and it laid me up for a couple of weeks. I seem to have recovered well, except for the time lost from work. In my line of work, at this time of year, there are deadlines which I have to meet. I'm going to need to burn a bit of midnight oil to catch up. At the same time, I've got to help my parents move out of their house. It'll all be over by Christmas but in the meantime, I'll be busy.

This means I'm going to need a bit of time set aside to wind down. If you've followed my blog on Billabong Marina, you may have come across my 15 minute a day philosophy. If not, check it out here. I have to confess, that I don't always stick to it and sometimes my 15 minutes is spent on other hobbies. But when life gets busy, I always fall back on it.

What's this got to do with operations? Just before I got sick, I nutted out some ideas.

First up, I use car cards and waybills. This means that I need to make a whole heap of boxes - one for each industry and siding. Done. I even painted them according to the colours used on my waybills. I colour code the destinations for different sections on my layout. I got the idea from the Willow Creek Railroad. It's worth clicking on the link.

Next I had to plan and write up my waybills. I put a lot of effort in making sure that every wagon goes to the right place and all the sidings are shunted with the right number of wagons. I've seen other layouts and they have a one in one out policy. If you put a cement wagon in, you pull one cement wagon out, even if there are two in the siding. I have worked my waybills out this way.

I also have the idea that every morning four trains arrives from Sydney, Canberra, Melbourne and Bega. The last is a pick up goods. Don't forget that my layout is fictitious and that I have dumped enough people to populate a small city where there is currently nothing but bush.

These trains arrive in Boydtown Yard and get sorted onto different trains. Trip trains take the wagons to their destinations, swap them over and return to Boydtown Yard for the wagons to be re-marshalled into the trains for the four off layout destinations. These trains leave for staging and the session is over. This did happen a couple of times with the old layout.

Right before my Covid stint, I did start messing about with this. I have to say it is a lot of fun. I made sure that all of the car cards were sorted correctly into the right boxes. However, while chatting to a mate, who gave the layout the once over on a visit, came the suggestion that the layout was overstocked. He's not wrong.

Here's one example. The fish siding at the new Billabong Marina takes four refrigerated vans. The fish is loaded for overnight delivery to Canberra and Sydney they are swapped over near the end of an operation day with four which have come off the inbound trains earlier in the day.

Is it fair to expect that in the real world, this might not happen? Could the vans of the arriving trains just be taken and deposited in to an empty siding? The folks at the fish siding could spend all day loading them for an evening pick up. This means there are four vans that don't need to be on the layout.

Here is another example. I have 6 Austrains GME container wagons. I love the back story which was on the Austrains website at the time. They were in fixed trains with a guards van at each end and were worked between - I want to say - White Bay where there containers came from the ship to Rozelle Yard where the containers were unloaded. I could be totally wrong. I haven't been able to find the information for a few years. I like the idea and have always kept the wagons together. They work from the new Billabong Marina to the Junction Yard Container Depot.  (One day I should put together a diagram of the layout.) 

When they are picked up from the harbour, they have always been replaced by the same number of wagons. Could they be picked up from the container depot in the morning and be placed wharf side and returned in the evening?

The container depot can hold 12 of this length wagon. Does it need to be full all the time? One thought is that it could hold the 6 GME wagons in the morning. When the trains from staging arrive, containers are taken off and then hauled to Junction Yard. The GMEs are picked up and taken to the harbour. In the evening, the reverse happens.

However, the loco could leave the harbour with nothing but a guards van as there are no wagons to collect. I have now got away from the one in, one out idea with both of these examples.

As I muck about on the layout, I jot down notes as I go. I hope to spend some time this week jotting down more notes. The layout needs a bit of clearing at the moment as somethings were placed in the layout room for somewhere to go. My first job tomorrow with be to tidy up a bit.

I also want to find out more about JMRI Operations Pro. It could be something worth trying.

Let me finish with a photo I took on a trip to the UK before the pandemic. I don't have an image of what I've been writing about and I like a photo in my posts. It's a class 66 with some hopper wagons heading through Leicester 15th January, 2020. 

Until next time.