Passenger Operations: Part 2: Passenger Tickets

 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 crew if they had to pick up or drop off a passenger at a particular depot.

The tickets had a spot for the train number, the destination, the number of passengers, and the type of accommodations (Coach seat, section, roomette, bedroom, or Drawing room).

The initial idea was to have a passenger train come out of staging with a “base consist”, the consist of cars that would cover the needs of passengers over a particular route, during normal demand.

At this point the Passenger Foreman, that was the name I gave to the job on my layout, would go over the tickets, totaling up the “Demand” and matching that to available accommodations. If it fit with-in  the base consist, nothing more was done, if the “Demand” exceeded the accommodations of the base consist, additional cars could be added.

Depending on the demand you might add another coach, or another sleeper (Configured to match the accommodation demanded: section, roomette, bedroom, drawing room, etc)

This system works well at a terminal facility, not in the middle of a passenger trains run, in western West Virginia.

But passenger trains did pick up and drop off passengers at regular rural stops as well as flag stops, so I used these tickets to represent a passenger getting on or off the train at various stations as the train negotiated my layout.

Passenger train crews were notified at the start of their run, by message form, of any passenger pick up’s or drop offs with special attention to flag stops, because of the out of the way, unexpected nature of that type of stop.

Train crews were supposed to go through all their paperwork before each run to make sure of their potential “Work” en route, sometimes passengers were forgotten, but not all that often. A passenger forgotten at a station was assigned to a following passenger or Mail &Express train. A passenger forgotten on a train, went on the next train going in the opposite direction, as a back haul. These forgotten passenger moves usually happened the next session.

As a general rule there was a very positive response from operators to passenger tickets as well as mail and express bill-of lading*, and in my opinion and in my experience they add to the play value of operating a passenger train.

Do you simulate the procedure of picking up and dropping off passengers using “Tickets”?

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*Mail & Express Bills of Lading: each passenger train, in addition to using tickets to simulate the procedure of picking up and dropping off passengers also picked up and dropped off mail and express packages. I specifically called the forms for passengers “Tickets” and the firms for Mail &Express “Bills” (Short for “Bills of lading”) in order to further delineate these two separate passenger train processes. My passenger trains picked up and set out cars, they picked up and dropped passengers, and they picked up and dropped off mail and express packages; they were very busy jobs.