Designing and implementing a traffic plan: Part One A

 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 side, to be honest, Mail and Express is what our passenger trains are built for. If we carry any passengers, good on us.*  We bring food, fuel, and building materials to the Metropolitan Northeast, East, and Mid Atlantic. We bring manufactured products from the Factories of the East to the rest of the United States.

The Atlantic Inland Railway is part of the Alphabet Route; NKP, WLE, PWV, AIR, WM, RDG, NH,CNJ, LHR. The Alphabet Route was built to compete head to head with the PRR, NYC, and the ERIE for traffic between New York City to Chicago and St. Louis. It reality it did so effectively, so my part of the Alphabet Routes traffic is St. Louis to Charleston, WV and on to Richmond and Washington DC.

I’ll go into a lot more detail on my traffic plan in Part One, but I wanted to get this posted, and I wanted to get you thinking about traffic plans.

*Passengers, actual people, probably were not a big contributor to our bottom line. In all probability passengers COST us more money than they made us.


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