Operation

[railroader9731]

I have heard about useing decks of playing cards to set up how long a train is what cars get picked up and so on. Any one have a good idea on how this system works?

[BR60103]

I don't know about playing cards, but I've read about dice. Systems like this usually just tell you how many cars to collect and let the engineer pick out which ones.
There are systems with car cards where you have a card for each car listing places it can go and you work your way down the card -- carry the cards along with the train and leave them where you set out the car.
Another system has car cards and waybills -- the waybill lists goods to be moved from one point to another and has to be matched with an appropriate car. May also have conditions (reefer must be iced before being loaded).

[Ralph]

I saw a mention of that in Model Railroader recently on a layout photo tour but they didn't elaborate.

[Russ Bellinis]

The way bill & car card functions like the paper work the prototype would use in some cases. They would put all of the information into the computer and have a single manifest for each car. Then they would print out the manifests with a switch list for the train which the conductor would have to decide where to pick up or set out cars. With the way bill and car card, you don't need to type up a fresh manifest for every operating session. The car card describes the car including it's number & reporting marks. The way bill describes the commodity.
When you put the way bill with the car card and assign an industry, you have a manifest. This is pretty basic and maybe obvious to everyone, but I suspect it is worth mentioning. You can use dice or paying cards or even take one leave one systems, but when you go to a way bill and car card system, you actually simulate moving freight from one location to another instead of just doing a switching puzzle.

[Ralph]

That's a good description of the card process Russ! Probably one of the easier to understand descriptions I've heard. Have you ever seen a variation that uses actual playing cards (hearts, spades, clubs, diamonds) like mentioned above? I saw a photo of a layout with a little shelf holding such cards. I don't know i the number or suit are used to represent cars...or what?

Ralph

[steinjr]

Lots of ways to generate traffic for a layout. Some of the ways that can be used for a small switching layout is described on Adrian Wymann's web site: http://www.wymann.info/ShuntingPuzzles/s...youts.html Have a look at his description of scenario lists for industries.

A variant would be to say that if you draw a card from a card deck and get a heart, you have a car for industry A. If you draw a diamond (or whatever you call that card symbol), it is a car for industry B, if you draw a spade it is a car for industry C and so on and so forth. Or you can use the numbers 1 - 13 (ace to king) to determine industry and the suite to determine type of car or whatever you prefer.

For a bigger layout where you actually route traffic - ie where you have yards that will sort cars into different trains bound for different off layout destinations (ie staging), it may makes more sense to set up waybills for a specific car - you sit down and work out four consecutive moves a specific car will make.

Say "Boxcar X" will
1) first come from New York (left end staging) with a load for Industry J.
2) When the Industry has unloaded the car, it will be moved to Industry Z for loading.
3) It will then move loaded from Industry Z to a destination in Des Moines (right end staging)
4) Finally it will be transiting your layout from left end staging to right end staging

Now you can start over on cycle 1 again, or replace the waybills with other waybills.

What kind of traffic generation you might prefer depends on the size of your layout and how you want to run your layout.

Smile,
Stein