Freight House Operations: Foreign Road Freight Houses

 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 anyway, there is no play value to the sorting and re-shuffling  created by the multiple LCL waybills in these cases.

The idea of multiple Foreign Road FH’s was introduced to me by Henry Freeman. He is building a beautiful layout, based on the B&O in Chicago, and has something like eight different major FH’s.

If you are interested in modeling the LCL business and Freight Houses there are several guys to get in touch with,  Ralph Heiss, Dave Ramos, and Henry Freeman. From that point there are probably MANY more. 

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