Building and operating the Atlantic Inland

 Coal, on AIR1 & 2, moves from mines to the railroads marshaling yard on a waybill called a “Mine Tag”. The “Mine Tag”, On the AIR, I have a two SIDED waybill, back and front. One side reads  “Mine Tag-50 tons of coal” or something like that, “To Pettigrew Yard for weighing and classification”, again,  or words to that effect. On the other side of this waybill I have printed various on or off-layout destinations, which give final billing to each car. There are, as I’ve discussed before, several bills that simply read “Over-weight” which simulates a car that is over loaded, and must be partially off-loaded. As a general rule coal on the Atlantic Inland goes two directions: TIDE  or LAKE.  In 1952 every hopper moves on an individual waybill, and there were THOUSANDS of separate consignee’s for these loads. I have chosen NOT to model all these consignees on my waybills. You know, each individual coal dealer, every small business that, at that time, has a small ...

 Should cuts of cars in a transfer to a foreign road be blocked? If there are no contractural agreements between the roads I’m saying no. If your yard has a track devoted to connecting road “a” and you place only cars for that road on the track, when you are ready to transfer it, IT IS BLOCKED, as far as you are concerned.  Now that cut might be a Dogs breakfast when it gets to the connecting roads yard, but as long as all the cars in that block all belong to Road “A”, you have done your job. Now what if your road is, in its daily course of business, part of a consortium of railroads who agree to forward TRAINS from one to another in such a manner that they are not delayed and moves to its final destination in an efficient manner? Would the cars in your interchange cuts be “distant blocked”* to facilitate fast, efficient, easy handling? The point is, it’s not just an interchange block, but a THROUGH train, being handed off to the next operating road. On the Alphabet Route ther...

  Today’s Thompson Blog is about a specific company service tank car built by and fir the SP. This article brings to mind  company service cars of all kinds. On AIR 1 I built several small fleets of Company Service cars. The THREE types that first come to mind are the Sand Service Hoppers, Diesel Service Tank Cars, and Cinder Gondolas. Athearn produces/produced (?) a series of company service tank cars for roads all over North America that modelers generally misuse. Since I treated engine service as an INDUSTRY, that is to say it is something more generally treated as a regular industry to spot and pull cars, as opposed to a location to either simulate the servicing of, or simply display locomotive models, I thought I needed cars for company service.  It would have been easier, and just as plausible, to spot any car owner’s car of the appropriate type at the industries, or loading spots, of the various engine service facilities on the AIR, but I chose to model “Company” c...

 On AIR 1 I used puff ball trees. I used the most common recipe, take a small ball of fiber, spray it with cheap green spray paint, then dunk it in Forest Green ground foam. Then I take some large scissors and  cut each puff ball in half. I spray 3-M’s 77 spray adhesive on the landform, and glue the half puffballs to that, crowding them together a little to leave no gaps. I was recently at Jeff Mutter’s Erie Lackawanna layout, after a long COVID delay, and paid particular attention to his backdrop scenery. One thing I noticed was benchwork depth. His scenes are 12-16 inches deep, and since I am planning a great deal of 12” or LESS scenery, I wanted to see how that plays. I felt, from my subjective point of view, it looked GREAT. Another aspect was the angle of the backdrop, how far did it slope away from the track.  The angle of slope can cost a great deal of space, on AIR 2 my standard was to place the foot of the backdrop at six inches out from the wall and slope back t...

I think traffic plans are as important to a model railroad as almost any other item. What you’re hauling and WHERE will dictate track layout. I thought the traffic plan for AIR 1 was pretty well thought out. It was NOT.  AIR1 was built with a lot of preconceived notions, and a LOT were wrong. I am spending a lot of the time between layouts researching my traffic plan, learning about the commodities I hope to haul, and getting a fuller picture on some features I had on AIR1 and want again on AIR2. To this end I have made great use of “Steam Powered Videos comprehensive Railroad Atlas of North America” by Mike Walker. I’m not sure if it is still in print, but it SHOULD be. I believe the Atlas, in multiple volumes that cover different regions of North America, was a labor of love, as opposed to a profitable venture. I think it was by modelers for modelers, I know many of the contributors personally. It is available from Amazon, but it’s pricy. I got pretty much all the atlas’s that co...

 My idea is to use transfers between the Atlantic Inland and several connecting foreign roads as a means to compensate for the differing ability levels of different operators. If a crewman can switch 100 cars during a session, he can request additional cars which come to him via these transfers. An operator with a lower skill level, who might only switch 20 cars in the same session, will obviously not require as much work. Unfortunately there are practical limits to this, once every car spot is filled, cars can be off-spotted, but if cars continue to arrive they will stack up, trailing off into the distance. Once the initial “pulls” have been accomplished, these would be staged in between sessions, no more pulls would be available ASSUMING there is no re-staging during a session (At Gary Siegel’s layout, admittedly many years ago, cars would be quickly restaged after the lunch/dinner break. Gary did not require paperwork on coal hoppers; his coal loads always went in the same direc...

For a long time I have been considering creating a job called “Freight Agent”. I have been thinking of combining the Freight Agent job with the Transfer job. Let him do both. But let me diagram what it is I think a Freight Agent does before I start combining the job with another. The Freight Agent would walk the entire layout, he is simulating what the prototype agent does when he visits every customer on his portion of the railroad. The Agent learns,  from speaking to customers, when cars will be ready for pick-up; when off-spot cars need to be spotted at loading doors or docks; he learns about MTY car requests; or inter-plant switch moves (Somewhere I was told that nearly 70% of all switch moves a railroad makes are inter-plant moves); and he tracks cars to let customers know when a load will arrive or reach its destination. He develops an intimate knowledge of the working of his railroad and the customers in his area of responsibility. What he can then do with this knowledge is ...

 On AIR 1 there were five branches that fed coal into the main line: Spooner’s Cove Branch Mt. Storm Branch Trammel Branch Moss Branch Priest Valley Branch Spooner’s Cove was worked from Pettigrew Yard and was within yard limits. Moss was simply a single track where a coal train was staged. Additionally there were tipples and loaders all over the layout that had their own spurs off sidings. Athol Coal #1 was at the west end of Athol Siding and Athol #2 was off the east end. Wingedfoot Coal Company #1 was at the east end of Wingedfoot siding. Consolidated Coal #8 was up in Summit. Mine runs originated from Pettigrew, ran to the appropriate Tipple, worked the loader or loaders assigned, and returned. While this system seems straight forward, the time it takes to write orders, and the space in the schedule to run these trains was always a problem, and I found that dispatchers lost site of the coal hauling function of the AIR and favorited the movement of freight trains over coal train...

 If you volunteer to help, BE A HELP! Do not be part of the problem. It is far better to say “No” than it is to show up and not help. Where I work I get all kinds of skill levels when we call the Union Hall for a bunch of carpenters. I will not fire you if you do not know how to do something, there is ALL kinds of work to do, I can use you.  -BUT- Do not tell me you can do something when you can’t. Don’t fight with my other carpenters of the security people. If you can’t get from the parking lot to the job site without fighting with the security guards, go home. What I mean is, show up to HELP. Hopefully I am organized enough to have enough materials together so when you show up, you are making trees with-in minutes of sitting down. Do you know what I mean? Technical help is another matter all together. I am very particular about the technical help I get. I do not want something that I do not KNOW, I mean REALLY KNOW how to fix fast in case it fails during a session. So becaus...

 On Air 1 I had four main staging yards, EAST, WEST, SOUTH, and WM. Additionally I had four smaller staging yards: Mt. Storm Branch which had three tracks, Trammel Branch which had two tracks, and Priest Valley Branch and Moss Branch  which had one track. Most of the staging yards had more than ample trackage to hold the trains they needed, but WEST was often crowded because generally traffic eastward off layout could go into three yards, but all traffic westbound only went one place. As the layout evolved fewer and fewer tracks were needed in EAST, SOUTH, and WM, but WEST, by the nature of the layouts physical geography could not grow. Another issue that cropped up was traffic volume. I used TTTO to control traffic. TTTO has an upward limit of the number of trains it can handle. You simply cannot move another train. On AIR 1 I planned work for each job, based on the number of cars per session each job might expect to switch. For example while the Littlerock Commercial Switche...

 On AIR1 a large, centrally located industry, was Wingedfoot Paper. As Jon Cure is fond of saying, a paper mill is the perfect Model Railroad industry. The major raw material is wood pulp. In 1952  pulpwood, cut and stacked like cord wood, was shipped to mills in a variety of cars. Nearly any car you can name was used, or modified in such a way as to become, a pulpwood hauler. Generally pulpwood was not valuable enough to travel far. The collection of pulpwood racks I have,  needs a great deal of repainting and re-lettering.  I just don’t think it’s likely to see Atlantic Coast Line cars hauling pulpwood into central WV! I have been toying with the idea of repainting cars from distant foreign roads and just adding a simplified lettering, using the premise that they are not for interchange. We’ll see. [4/19/22 this afternoon I went through the box of pulpwood cars. I think with only a few exceptions I’m going to have to repaint these flats and letter them for the AIR....

 LCL traffic originating, terminating and traveling between FH’s is a major component of my operations on the Atlantic Inland (AIR). I recently mocked up LCL traffic and determined that my plan for interchanging cars between foreign roads,  via transfers that originate in small off-layout staging yards,  will create more traffic volume than my Inbound and Outbound FH’s can handle. Based on what I learned about LCL operations from the Kalmbach book by Jeff Wilson*, I designed an Inbound FH that had room for twelve cars. The Outbound House had only a six car capacity. The logic behind this design decision was that Littlerock, WV would be, like most other communities in the USA, a net consumer of LCL packages. I had no basic plans to model a large enough industry, which shipped a lot of LCL shipments, on the layout. What I found out was that each of these planned foreign railroad transfer runs would contain at least one car billed to the Inbound FH, and that I would send one...

 I always liked complex waybills. I always thought that the waybill should tell a story, what’s in the car, where it came from, who’s shipping it and receiving it, what it weighs and costs. All these things help tell an imaginary story, at least to me. Then I started operating on a large layout, in my case Gary Siegel’s L&N EK Division layout. Even though, after 25 years, I can still look at one of Gary’s waybills and tell you where it’s going, EVERYONE tells me how complicated his waybill system is. “Where the hell is Knoxville?!?” If I had a dime for every time someone came up to me at Gary’s and asked me where a car goes, well I’d have a lot of dimes anyway… in talking with a LOT of operators at Gary’s about the Waybills, I learned that the waybill itself confused them. There was too much information on it.  WHERE DOES THIS CAR GO? That’s all they want to know.   Operators are not dumb, but they are lazy, me included! A while back I operated at Otis McGees lay...

 A major part of the operating scheme of AIR 1 was the grade and helper operations. AIR1 was double decked, and had a long continuous grade,  as opposed to a helix, connecting the decks. “The Grade” was 86’ long and had various different sections that were at different gradients. The first 24’ out of Pettigrew was at 3%. This continued to the west switch at Salisbury, where the grade leveled to 1%, and at the east switch of Salisbury the grade increased to 2% for the remainder of the trip up to Summit, where, at the west switch Summit, the grade leveled out to 0. I liked the grade and arranged motive power in such a way that no train could, generally, climb the grade with out help. Helpers were stationed at Pettigrew, and these helpers were operated by the person who chose the Helper job. There were three sets of helpers, a 2-10-2, a 2-8-8-2, and a pair of 2-6-6-2’s. The three separate sets, the 2-6-6-2’s were permanently consisted together and always acted as “One” locomotive...

 Like trains setting out LCL bills to simulate delivering LCL packages, passenger trains pick up and set out passengers. I was heavily influenced by an article in Model Railroader by Bill Darnaby about how he set up passenger operations at his club.  In my opinion having a train crew stop at a station and count off minutes pretending to pick up or drop off passengers is unenjoyable and, frankly, a nuisance. I thought if passenger train crews had some “positive function” to perform that simulated this process, it would make the standing time at a station seem more interesting. I found that going whole hog into terminal passenger operations did not work well on AIR1, but I did want the crews of my passenger trains to do more than just drive a train from A to B. I developed a passenger ticket that was meant to dovetail with a procedure to add more cars of specific types to the consist based on demand, but I never used this system, and just used these tickets to tell the train cre...

 On AIR 2 I plan to have several foreign roads connect with the AIR. At these interchange points I hope to have a foreign road depot and a freight house(FH). I hope to incorporate into the LCL procedures the transfer of one or more boxcars of LCL packages betwixt and between all these FH’S. So let’s assume for now I have three foreign roads present on this layout: WM, N&W, and B&O. Each of these Roads FH’s would interchange a LCL boxcar with each of the other roads present on the layout as well as the AIR, their cars going to the AIR Inbound FH. The AIR, in turn, would send each of these foreign roads a boxcar from the AIR Outbound FH. In all, twelve boxcars of LCL package transfers, would be criss-crossing the layout. I’m not sure I will utilize the multiple LCL waybills in this case, at least not in the case of cars going to any FH EXCEPT for the AIR Inbound FH. Since a car received at the B&O FH, for example, would most likely be heading off-layout before unloading a...

 A Transfer Freight House (TFH) is a facility railroads built at major junctions where LCL packages are re-sorted to forward them on their way to their final destinations. I plan to model one on my next layout. It will have 48 doors or spots, so it will have a 48 car capacity. Each door will, ROUGHLY, correspond to a different off layout destination. Some destinations will have more doors assigned to them than others. I initially planned to have 12 off-layout destinations divided amount the 48 doors. Each track at the TFH will be organized in such a way that when pulled, the cars are blocked for easy classification and connections with other expedited LCL trains. Railroads generally moved LCL from FH to FH, resorting as they went until the package EVENTUALLY reached a destination where its Consignee could either pick it up or the package could easily be delivered to their door. This is not to say that railroads did not load an entire car with LCL packages for one city. A sealed thr...

 When using TTTO to control traffic, trains not on the Time-Table are called “Extras”. On the AIR all coal trains run as extras. (Yes, I could have established a schedule, and every coal load moving in the appropriate direction, in the yard at the time of this scheduled trains departure time could be included, but I thought this would be more trouble than it was worth. Model railroad YM’s ALWAYS try to get just one more car into a train. They often forget a scheduled train is coming up. They often forget to put cars into up coming trains…). On AIR 1 mine runs returned with loads. These loads were weighed and classified. When 25 loads going in a like destination we’re accumulated they were built into a train, and this train was parked in the Pettigrew “A” yard and the dispatcher was notified of its presence. Coal trains received the symbols CXE or CXW, Coal Extra East of Coal Extra West. On AIR1 we had a rule, “The dispatcher required one hour (real time) advance notice of an extra”...

The difference on the model railroad between “regular” carload operation and Less Than Carload, or LCL, operation is with traditional carload operation one simply moves railroad car models around their layout, generally with some type of car forwarding system. LCL represents many packages, all going somewhere different, loaded in a boxcar going to a freight house. In the steam era LCL provided railroads with huge revenues and was a large percentage of tonnage. We can ignore this, or model it. If you model LCL operation how do you simulate the movement of these packages. Let’s back up a bit and define, for the purposes of this debate, what LCL cargo is. A carload boxcar load is, to keep this simple, an entire boxcar of one item, going to one consignor, in one location.An LCL boxcar load is a boxcar filled with MANY different packages, each package going to a different consignor, in a multitude different destination,  VIA A SINGLE distribution point, IE., the railroad freight house (...

 On AIR 1 while WM , N&W, CRR, and VGN trains had trackage rights over some or all of the layout, there were no freight houses for these foreign roads. Often in towns served by two or more competing lines one will find a freight house for each of these roads. In Winchester, VA the freight houses for the PRR and the B&O still stand today. On AIR 2 I do not plan model the extensive trackage rights as on the first layout. I plan to have these foreign roads to come on to the layout via either a short run of their track, visibly modeled, terminating at an interchange point, or simply a transfer from an off layout staging yard. In short fairly limited presence. However at each of these interchange points there should be some foreign road structures in their colors to give strong visual clues that these tracks do indeed belong to someone else. In a few cases, WM and N&W  for sure, some of these foreign road structures will be a freight house. Again, relying on the Kalmbac...

After World War Two the use of coal for home heating and cooking begin to decline, as the 1950’s dawned this decline accelerated and coal was replaced by Gas. The use of Natural gas was regional, and in places where natural gas was not readily available coal gasification, Coal Gas or Town Gas as it was commonly called, was used to supply requirements.  In my era municipalities produced gas for Commercial or residential use from two basic sources, that were also regional, petroleum or coal. If you were located near a cheap source of crude, low grade, oil your town gas was extracted by cooking down that crude oil. Obviously on the AIR 2 layout we would be producing town gas from coal, IE., Coal Gasification. If you are of a certain age you will remember large “Gasometers”, round tanks with a web-like structure of steel beams and trusses, and a top that rose and fell with gas capacity. The top of the gasometer would force the gas in the tank down and into pipes, creating pressure. I r...

 I had grandiose plans for 8 foot aisles… On AIR1 I built a building for the railroad. The train room was 25’ X 52’. On AIR 2 we planned another building, 50’ x 50’, but after two years of building my current house, BY-MY-SELF, with only my Wife as helper, we were too tired of building ANYTHING.  I simply can not face another large building project. It was decided that the railroad would occupy the basement of our new house, and to be honest there are a lot of reasons, other than NOT building a building, that I really like like about this decision.  First, it moves up the schedule for a new railroad by about two years. Second, proximity. On AIR 1 I literally was a cell phone call away from my wife if she needed something. In the basement all she needs to do is raise her voice! In bad weather, admittedly not that often in Southern California, but common here in Northern Virginia, I had to walk out through the weather, this often discouraged me. The space is roughly 2000 sq...