Action Bills

 Often cars might need to be diverted from the base routing directed by their primary Waybills.

A Reefer may, for example, need to be iced, top iced, have salt added, have ventilator hatches opened or closed or have heaters installed and lit off or removed.

How do we direct a car to the Ice Dock for five and a half additional tons of ice and 600 Lbs of salt? I used what my friend Al Daumann and I came to call an “Action Bill”. An action bill is a bill I place in the card pocket, in front of the primary waybill, which will direct the car to do a specific function. Once that secondary function is completed the action bill is removed.

These “functions” might be weighing, a trip to the RIP track, resting stock, as well as icing. One major problem with “Actions” is the layout owner, the person who staged the layout, is probably the only person  who actually understands the “action”. Re-directing a Reefer from a through train to the ice dock is all the regular crew recognizes: an extra switch move.

He will have no idea if you are adding 500 Lbs of salt, opening a ventilator hatch half way, or adding a heater.

Because of this Al and I have slightly diverged in our view and implementation of a action bills. Al’s bills are more specific, while mine might simply read “ICE”, “WEIGH”, “RIP”, or “REST”.

The whole point of action bills is to flesh out several procedures and make them, in my opinion, more prototypically fun. 

I would site livestock shipments. As many of us know, livestock can only be confined in a car for a limited time: 28 or 36 with signed permission, hours. Knowing this we might build some stock pens on our layout and label it a “Rest Station”.

Certain livestock loads might then be billed to these rest stations where the stock is off loaded, fed, watered, and “rested”.  8 hours later this load of stock might then be reloaded, switched into an appropriate train, and forwarded on its way.

To take this rest station operation a few steps further, often the prototype might unload stock to be rested, return the home road cars to their home road, and reload the stock into home road stock cars, there-by capturing some of the line-haul revenue (Often you will find prototype Waybills with two or more car reporting marks and numbers listed on the bill). Stock cars need to be cleaned and fresh bedding, usually sand, added. Cattle will require single deck cars, hogs or sheep might go in double deck cars. A load of hogs from a double deck car might have to be loaded into two single deck cars if that’s all that’s available.

Rest stations will need shipments of feed, gondolas of bedding sand, and possibly a gondola of manure removed.

As you can imagine the added switching of livestock cars becomes far more complex as opposed to simply traveling across the layout. 

Al and I developed the action bill on our respective layouts, saw what each of us was doing, got together, and modified and refined our concept of action bills.