Building and operating the Atlantic Inland

 I guess I never saw a good idea I couldn’t try to make better with dubious results.  We’ll see.  I wanted to model coal loading from hoppers to a River barge. My motivation for this was to make use of a fleet of foreign road hoppers I already owned (And purchased without thinking it through. I guess I’m the only modeler in the world who did that). So these fleets of foreign road hoppers, 87 Western Maryland and 54 Clinchfield*,  would bridge my layout and eventually end up at the River, where they would supply a loader. Fine, great. Plausible. Then I got into a discussion, with another modeler who shares similarly poor judgement,  about loading grain at my elevator. He postulated that in many cases grain loading was dictated by harvest rush periods, and that it might not be totally prototypical for my mill and elevator to be loading a relatively few car loads of one type of grain. Now, I pointed out, my elevator is not a collection elevator and not a terminal e...

 I use car cards and waybills (CCWB) to forward cars on my layout. Generally I use the system used by numerous other layout owners which I’d describe as “The Micro-Mark/Rail Graphics” system, for lack of a better term. Manila card stock folded up to create a pocket, in which the second half, the waybill, is held. These two pieces of paper make up the waybill. This “Waybill” directs the travel of cars on our layouts.  For example, a waybill reads: “Old Dominion Furniture: Lumber Door” Reading this, the switch crew brings this car to Old Dominion Furniture, the large building over there, with the big sign on it that reads “Old Dominion Furniture”. Once there the crew finds two spurs adjacent to the building, one labeled “loading track” and the outside track is labeled “Storage”. On the building there are five doors adjacent to the loading spur, numbered 1, 2, 3, 4, and “Lumber Door”. Can you guess where this car goes? Here’s my point. Does it help the switch crew to be informed ...