Utilizing manpower: part one

 I wasn’t sure how to title this. On AIR1 I had a rule, no one could take the same job two sessions in a row unless no one else wanted the job. After some time a couple things happened. First, everyone got cross trained, and second some jobs got taken by the same people over and over again, all the time.

I didn’t like the second, but lived with it.

I also lived with some positions being taken by people who were not as skilled as others, and often this resulted in issues that effected other parts of the layout.

My motivation to do this was that I was very discouraged when I went to other layouts and long time operators were always the “Yardmaster”, or whatever. You had to wait until someone died to get a shot at a good job.

As a remedy we drew numbers each session, and #1 chose jobs first, #2 chose second, and so on. I liked this. Some did not. To change it up we would agree to choose in reverse order, that is #20 chose first, #19 chose second, and so on.

Because I did not like getting frozen out of certain jobs I made sure that did not happen on my layout. The interesting quirk was that, in certain jobs, it still did happen. I also found that many of the crew recoiled in terror from TTTO, and would show up for every session, but take a job, any job, that did not require reading a train order.

On AIR 2 I will still “Draw for seniority”, and I will try to strive to “cross train” everyone. I hope to keep trouble makers to a minimum.

As an operator I like to be left alone. I want to do the chosen job all by myself. I do not like two man crews. I do not like to be “over supervised”.  Because of that I need the documentation to be good. As a result I try to provide good documentation. I want to know what I’m supposed to do, what goes where, etc.  Because of this I STRIVE to provide my crews with the same information. 

I sincerely tried to get new people a chance to do every job. This caused a little general concern, because of the potential for an important job being screwed up by a newbie. I found veteran operators screwed these jobs up quite nicely, thank you.

I tried to design the jobs so that no one job could bring the railroad to its knees. On AIR2 I have gone to great lengths to accomplish this. I believe Dispatcher is still the only job that has this potential. 

Because I hated to take jobs that were not interesting to me, I have gone to great lengths to design every job in such a way as to be interesting to me. Generally the feedback I received from AIR 1 was positive in this regard. It remains to be seen on AIR2.

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