Freight House Operations: New thoughts on LCL waybills

 On my new layout, AIR2, Freight House operations are going to be a large part of the game. Up until relatively recently I had planned to use waybills to simulate LCL packages. So if we take the Transfer Freight House for example, it’s planned to get 48 cars spotted at the beginning of each session. This initial 48 cars is supposed to get pulled over the course of the session and a final 48 cars get’s re-spotted there. That’s 96 cars. If I place multiple LCL waybills in the card pockets of each cars car cards, it would be roughly four bills per car; 368 waybills, representing LCL loads. The crew would pull all these inbound bills, sort and collate them, then reload them into boxcars by destination.

In practice this turned out to be AT BEST, a nuisance, and more often than not, unworkable. The idea was to simulate the movement of LCL packages. It overwhelmed the operators.

What I failed to take into consideration was the scope of my operation. The “Freight House” job had something like eight separate freight houses to switch. Something in excess of 200 cars to switch. The scope and size of my layout did not lend itself well to the idea of independent, multiple, LCL waybills.

Our game was moving cars, not moving packages. The idea of multiple LCL bills has merit on a layout that is either smaller, or has a narrower scope. At Dave Ramos’s New York Harbor railroad, even though he actually focuses directly on the freight houses themselves, the multiple LCL bills was unworkable.

LCL traffic is a huge part of steam era railroading. Every depot from Grand Central terminal to a one horse shack out on some distant granger line had a freight house or freight room. LCL was the point of contact between the railroads and the vast majority of AMERICA. I still am intensely interested in playing the LCL game, but I’m not going to ask my crews to sort hundreds of waybills, shuffling paper for half a session. Moving cars is the game I play, that’s where the focus of my operations will lie.



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