Distant Blocking

 On AIR 1 I asked YM’s to just block for the next yard down the line. It was not really THAT sophisticated. Waybills routing cars off layout had four destinations:

WEST

EAST

SOUTH

WM

That was it. 

On AIR 2 I am asking YM’s to block cars to far more “sub-destinations”

For example WEST is now broken down to two major sub-categories : St. Louis or Chicago

And each of them is broken down further. For example the CHICAGO block is broken into:

Cleveland

Toledo

Detroit

Chicago

The ST. LOUIS block is similarly broken down.

Here’s my conundrum, at a recent clinic Mark Amfahr presented a great deal of prototypical data that suggests  that Steam Era railroads simply blocked cars for the next yard, and the concept of “Distant Blocking” is a product of the 1960’s-1970’s.

Admittedly Mark worked for large Western Roads (UP for example) and this information might not be completely true for Eastern roads where the physical plants were vastly different.

What I wanted to do on AIR2 was to give my YM position the ability to increase or decrease the complexity of the position to suit the ability of the operator.

If a newbie was YM, he could accomplish his task if all the CHICAGO (Denoted by the color Orange as well as the written destination) cars were in the right staging yard. I would not be faced with a Re-staging nightmare if the Cleveland cars were mixed with the Detroit cars.

On the other hand a veteran YM could build four blocks for CHICAGO bound trains: Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Chicago.

-BUT- 

Now we add the “Amfahr Curve Ball”. On AIR2 the Atlantic Inland reaches Chicago by connecting with the WLE railroad at Zanesville, Oh.*

So should I ask my YM’s to block all cars going to Chicago, Detroit, Toledo, and Cleveland into a block for the WLE in Zanesville, and call it good?



*As part of the Alphabet Route the Atlantic Inland hands off to the Wheeling and Lake Erie (WLE), who then hands off to the  Nickel Plate (NKP) who takes the train into Chicago.

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