Two Man Crews on the Model Railroad

 As a general rule I do not like two man crews. I do not like administrative yardmaster jobs. I want to drive the engine, read the waybills and make the decisions. I think I work more efficiently, plus I enjoy myself far more.

I see the need, however, in SOME situations for a two man crew. Twenty years ago on Patrick Pope’s layout at a town called Mesa, I think, I worked with my Friend Lee Walser, who at the time was a NS conductor. Mesa is long and spread out, twenty feet or more I think. It worked very well to have one of us at each end of this town. Additionally my friend conducted the radio conversation as if we were working on NS, and it did add to the enjoyment.

I partnered with Rene La Voise while working a yard on Mike Peters late Wyoming Railink layout. That came off very well.

I learned, from my work, that the administrative yard master is often the only way to get a yard worked efficiently. I was always a foreman who wore his bags, I always tried to build while leading. When you have four carpenters, that works fine. When you have forty, that’s impossible. There are too many carpenters who need answers to questions for me to be off building something. That which I gain by building myself, is lost several times over by failing to provide leadership to the crew. This same thing happens at an administrative yard. I love being a “Foot-board” yardmaster, but with two or three other crews all depending on me for answers, I cannot be devoting my brain power to switching a few cars.

I do not generally like two man crews. There is the square footage issue to consider, putting twice as many people in the same space. One of the crew MUST be subservient for it to work well, and often times two strong willed operators get assigned.

I avoid situations where two man crews are offered. I, at my own layout,  try to structure jobs for one person.

There seems to be a trend towards two man crews and towards “hands-off” jobs; clerks, station agents, agent operators. This trend disappoints me. I’m here to play trains. Not watch, get over supervised, or clerk.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wingedfoot Paper Part 2: Pulpwood

 On AIR1 a large, centrally located industry, was Wingedfoot Paper. As Jon Cure is fond of saying, a paper mill is the perfect Model Railroad industry. The major raw material is wood pulp. In 1952  pulpwood, cut and stacked like cord wood, was shipped to mills in a variety of cars. Nearly any car you can name was used, or modified in such a way as to become, a pulpwood hauler. Generally pulpwood was not valuable enough to travel far. The collection of pulpwood racks I have,  needs a great deal of repainting and re-lettering.  I just don’t think it’s likely to see Atlantic Coast Line cars hauling pulpwood into central WV! I have been toying with the idea of repainting cars from distant foreign roads and just adding a simplified lettering, using the premise that they are not for interchange. We’ll see. [4/19/22 this afternoon I went through the box of pulpwood cars. I think with only a few exceptions I’m going to have to repaint these flats and letter them for the AIR....
Read more

Freight House Operations: LCL and Freight Houses

 LCL is a huge source of revenue, car loading, and tonnage for railroads of the steam era. By the end of WWII numbers dropped fast, mainly due to trucks and roads. But to be honest LCL continued to be a big part of railroading. Today all that UPS traffic is LCL. There has been a lot of discussion of late about how to implement LCL  on a model railroad. My feeling is I do not want to perform a function by simply standing and counting off the seconds, pretending to off load LCL packages. What I did on AIR1 was to print up Waybills that simulated packages of LCL.  The peddler car was placed in the consist of a local, the car card for the peddler car had multiple bills in it, and as the local got to each depot, the train crew would check their LCL bills to check for a set out. You did not set out the car, you set out the BILL.  I extended this procedure for REA packages, US Mail, passengers, and now I plan to add this function for loaded milk cans, but more on all that l...
Read more

Freight House Operations: LCL from Foreign Road Freight Houses

 On AIR 1 while WM , N&W, CRR, and VGN trains had trackage rights over some or all of the layout, there were no freight houses for these foreign roads. Often in towns served by two or more competing lines one will find a freight house for each of these roads. In Winchester, VA the freight houses for the PRR and the B&O still stand today. On AIR 2 I do not plan model the extensive trackage rights as on the first layout. I plan to have these foreign roads to come on to the layout via either a short run of their track, visibly modeled, terminating at an interchange point, or simply a transfer from an off layout staging yard. In short fairly limited presence. However at each of these interchange points there should be some foreign road structures in their colors to give strong visual clues that these tracks do indeed belong to someone else. In a few cases, WM and N&W  for sure, some of these foreign road structures will be a freight house. Again, relying on the Kalmbac...
Read more