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.
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