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.