Coal Operations: More on Waybills

 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 power house. The list is nearly endless.

My procedure is for MTY hoppers come out of staging and return to a Pettigrew Yard.

At Pettigrew Yard each mine sends “MTY car requests”. These requests represent the number of hoppers each mine thinks they can fill next shift. The PYM takes these requests and builds mine runs, blocks of MTY hoppers, and sends them back to the mines.

These mine runs, traveling on train orders, return to each mine they are assigned, and upon arriving at the mine, pull loads and spot MTYS. Upon completion, the mine run, obtains orders to return to Pettigrew, and then returns.

Once back at Pettigrew these coal loads, each one with a Mine tag, gets classified and built into trains heading off-layout.

This process repeats again, and again, and again…

It’s what coal hauling railroads do. A giant, complex, conveyor belt, carrying coal to markets.

A major part of the coal business in the steam era (And later) were “Coal Brokers”.  Coal brokers have large lists of customers who all want coal, but have neither the time nor desire to contact thousands of mines individually, looking for enough of a particular product to satisfy their needs. When General Motors wants enough metallurgical coal for their steel Mills, they contact their broker and say “we’ll need 100,000 tons of met coal for operations next week”. The brokers search their list of mines and finds the correct grade and quantities of coal to fill this order. And that’s how Wingedfoot Coal Tipple #2 fills two Fifty ton hoppers with coal billed to General Motors Corp, Detroit, MI. 

More often than not coal brokers start hundreds of thousands of tons of coal moving from mines to marshaling yards, and often beyond, with NO SPECIFIC CUSTOMER for that coal. The Coal Brokers sell that coal enroute and those coal hoppers get redirected while in transit.

On the model railroad how do we simulate “Brokering Coal”? Do we even want to? I tried it. For a while On AIR1 I billed 1/3 of all my coal loads with a bill that read, “No Bill”, and then gave the PYM a stack of final waybills with the instruction that they were to bill the “No Bill” loads to off-layout destinations AS THEY SAW FIT.

What I often found, at the end of each session,  was a string of “no bill” hoppers on one track in the Pettigrew “B-Yard”. The brokering process, as I designed it, was just a nuisance process. I, the layout owner, knew what the process was and what I was simulating, but the operators just knew it was a bureaucratic process that delayed the movement of coal loads.

My car cards for coal hoppers had “When MTY return to PETTIGREW Yard” printed on them. I’m not sure if this was confusing to operators, but in one case I had a mine run crew bring ALL his MTYS back to Pettigrew yard, ignoring the paperwork that instructed him to spot them at the mines, because, he said, the car cards say, “When MTY return to Pettigrew yard”!

After that session I shut the railroad down for three months because I could not face dealing with that level of stupidity. But was it my stupidity for printing that on the car cards or the operator who, I think, did this intentionally, to mess with me.