Building and operating the Atlantic Inland

 I am a free lancer. These days that is generally scoffed at, but I am a proud free lancer. I sincerely try to make every facet of my layout prototypically plausible.  -BUT- Because I’m a free lancer I am not constrained by the prototype. With this in mind whenever I establish an industry on my layout I try to include as much operation as plausible.  To cut to the chase  every medium sized, or larger, industry on my layout has a storage track adjacent. The idea is the storage track holds MTY cars so there is a buffer of available MTY’s for the particular industry. On AIR1 at Old Dominion Furniture the storage track held about eight 50’ furniture boxcars*. Then the local would pull and spot cars for loading from the storage track, and set out MTY for loading cars on the storage track. It gave the local an extra move to make. The local would show up with four cars, spot two, re-spot two, and pull two for a total of six cars handled.  Last week in Southern Californ...

 I flew to Southern California last weekend to participate in SoCalOps. Way back in the mists of time I hosted op sessions for SoCalOps. It’s been a LONG time and I wanted to see the layouts. In fact I chose layouts I’ve never been to before. The funny thing is, I’ve known all of the layout owners for probably between 30 and 40 years. Al Daumann is the driving force behind SoCalOps, in fact when he first suggested the idea I told him I wanted NOTHING to do with the organization of the event, but that I would host as many sessions as I could over the long weekend. My first layout was actually a bonus session on Thursday afternoon. It was an outdoor G-Scale layout and I must say it was excellent. I had a lot of fun. My first selected layout was at Clark Bauman’s. I’ve known Clark at least 40 years. We used to live only a few blocks from each other and I regularly ran into him railfanning Burbank Jct.  -BUT- In all that time I’ve never been to his layout. Clark models the SP over...

 The idea is to creat a position whose responsibility is car utilization. He would receive some instructions at the start of the session like: 1) The apple warehouse needs 20 reefers. 2) The Flour Mill needs clean 40’ boxcars Etc. He might also receive several MTY car requests for one car. He would scan the industries around the layout. At one small town there might be a boxcar that has been released by an industry at one end of town, matched by a request for a car at the other. He would write a switch list instructing the local to pull the car from industry “A” and re-spot it at industry “G”. Also while scanning he might find several reefers that are MTY, which he would then bill to the clean-out track, and eventually these reefers would make their way to the Apple warehouse for loading. My guess is he would have blank bills that he would hand-write to re-direct the cars in question. There could be a bulletin instructing him to send MTY 40’ boxcars off-layout West for grain loadin...

 Wow this is going to take a while. The Atlantic Inland is my free lanced model railroad. This layout is the second large version of the Inland. It is basically an overlay of the C&O, or a substitute. The AIR runs from Newport News to East St.Louis. It is part of the Alphabet Route and is the direct connection between the WM and St. Louis. In the “Real” world this connection was made via the WLE to the NKP through Ohio and Indiana. So I am supposing that the AIR does in fact haul some tonnage between St. Louis and the WM  but also handles tonnage, over the AIR,  from St. Louis to Tidewater.  This version of the AIR exists in 1952. In the railroad world of 1952 raw materials, meat, produce and dairy moves from the South and West to the North and East. Coal, our primary commodity moves from the mines of West Virginia to Tidewater in the East or to the Steel Mills of the Midwest.  Railroad LCL is still a huge business. There is no UPS or FedEx yet.  Admitt...

 I’m very sorry I’ve taken so long to post anything. I want to talk about a traffic plan. I think the first thing you need to build on your model railroad is your traffic plan. The traffic plan should dictate what you build. In model railroading if you model a prototype your traffic plan is, for all intents and purposes, handed to you. You get the traffic plan your prototype ran or runs. So in many ways if you freelance it is far more difficult to build a traffic plan. Where in the “world” are you? When in the “world” are you? What railroads are you connecting with? These are important questions that you MUST answer before building a traffic plan and then a layout. My railroad, The Atlantic Inland, is a coal hauling, bridge route, running from Newport News, VA to East St. Louis, IL. in 1952, sound like the C&O? So obviously coal is a big part of my traffic plan. LCL is big business to us. Perishables, meat and produce, is a large part of our bridge traffic. On the Passenger sid...