05-26-2010, 12:11 AM
Gary S Wrote:I'm liking the switchlist idea more and more. It may be possible to create a large box of "customer needs (waybills)" that can be placed in a pseudo random order. This would be based on "industry A needs on average 3 empty boxcars each week, industry B ships 2 boxcars each week, industry C receives 8 covered hoppers each week etc." Then before each operating session, draw however many you want and then make the switchlist from that.
That's one way of doing it. Introduce an element of randomness not directly under your own personal control when you decide which cars to pull or spot. I also like that idea.
But that's does not seem to be Steve's idea about how to decide which cars to spot or pull. Sounds like Steve just looks around at what's on the layout (or on an updated master list or lists of what is where on his layout) and what cars he have available that could enter the layout, and then decides for himself that "This time, I feel like - mmm - I'll pull that boxcar from Industry A, and this car and that car from Industry C, spot a new boxcar at industry A, a tank car at Industry B and a boxcar at industry D. For added enjoyment, let's say I also am going to re-spot the gondola at industry D under the crane". And then he puts the required three inbound cars at an interchange track, and notes on his switch list which specific cars are to be pulled, spotted and re-spotted.
You can put as much or little thought into which cars to pull and spot as you like. You can e.g. base your choice of what to pick up or set out on your personal experiences with how long it normally would have taken to empty that car you spotted two simulated days earlier, or how often there typically would be inbound traffic for industry C.
Works fine. And it obviously is easier to balance a scenario where you decide for yourself both what you will move, where you will move it and (when you start switching) how you will move it.
What the waybills do is to separate (sometimes by an interval of years) the process of figuring out what to do and where to send cars from the process of deciding how to do it, in a fairly flexible way.
Of course, nothing prevents you from taking the information from the car cards/waybills and transferring to a single sheet of paper (the switchlist) before you start working your train (the switchlist e.g. "having been prepared by the yard clerk" or "the agent" before the switcher crew comes on duty), so you won't have to shuffle through the waybills while switching.
Having it all on one sheet of paper gives a little better overview of the switching to be done on the way than shuffling through a stack of cards, even if you keep the car cards sorted.
As for whether to do anything at all with waybills or only do a switch list - that depends on what you want to focus on simulating - modeling both routing of specific cars with specific loads and switching, or only modeling local switching.
The waybills are fairly nice to simulate the purposeful movement of cars across a layout, and create a need to route cars. And they are fairly easy to reset when you make changes you forget to make a proper note of - you don't have to print new switch lists - you just move the CC/WB combo to where you want it.
Me, for my small little switching layout, I want to focus on modeling local switching - spotting and pulling cars from industries, but not caring overly much about where the cars will go next once they have been sent back to the yard (or towards the yard, as it were). Because I don't have room to do much in the way of routing.
So for me waybills are more than I need to generate the semi-random (from the switching crew perspective) work for my switcher crews. But at the same time I don't want to decide what to do more or less at the same time as I decide how to do it. So I intend to create car requests in a way that introduce a small element of randomness.
As Steve pointed out - each of us get to decide the rules for the we want to game.
Smile,
Stein