Industries with their own rollingstock

[steinjr]

So as for operations and my GERN facility, can anyone give me some scenarios of how to use my GERN cars? My layout will be a point-to-point with interchange yards at each end with all loads either coming from or going to the interchanges.

There really isn't much of a functional difference on your layout between a company owned car and any other car. Like any other RR car - your company owned cars enter your layout from staging (or from an interchange track), and are then either taken directly to the industry for loading/unloading (often via a yard, if you have a yard on your layout), or - if you want to model the car being a returning empty for which you don't have a load lined up yet, taken to a storage track somewhere not too far from the industry, where the car can be held until there is a need for it to be taken to the industry to be loaded.

Such storage may happen in your local yard (if you have the spare space for it without totally messing up your yard's ability to do it's normal work), or on a siding somewhere, or at an extra spur at or near the industry.

Don't forget that it is totally up to you if you want to model holding an empty until there is a load for it. Hopefully, you are not planning to store dozens or hundreds of cars for indeterminate lengths of time - it might be fairly realistic when modeling a downturn of the economy to have a lot of idle cars around for months (before the oldest cars start getting sent off to be cut up for scrap), but it would kinda be boring for a model railroad layout to have it filled up with stored cars for which there is no demand :-)

Most cars should probably be modeled as being gainfully employed, not kept waiting in a taxi line for random carload sales, but moving on a fairly steady schedule between supplier (staging) and your plant, or between your plant and regular customer/distributor (staging) - say two or four or ten or whatever makes sense for your layout and your plant delivered to your industry daily (per operating session).

You can deliver all cars at once (and at the same time pull all outbound cars from the industry), or you can deliver half of the inbound cars on the morning turn (and pull any outbound cars then too), and deliver the second half of the cars on the afternoon turn, or whatever makes sense when it comes to your staging capacity, industy track capacity and the number of trains you are planning to run.

Smile,
Stein