Good, Better, Best (And pretty good)

 My partner in crime, as far as planning our respective railroads, is Al Daumann. We have adopted a system on our layouts we call “Good, Better, Best”.

It refers to our expectations of how a visiting crewman accomplishes the tasks we have given him.

If someone takes the Littlerock Yardmaster job on my layout, I’d be happy if they were able to route all the cars to the correct staging and on-layout yards: call this a good job.

If this Yardmaster was able to accomplish rudimentary blocking: I’d call this a better job.

If this same Yardmaster was able to block the Chicago/West cars as follows: Zanesville, Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, Chicago. And then was able to accomplish the same detailed distant blocking for the St.Louis/West cars, as well as the blocks going to Jay Yard, 8th Street, NYC Transfer, B&O Transfer, and the C&O Transfer I’d call this the best job.

Will this crewman be able to do all those things I’ve just described, maybe, but probably not. However, my system will not break down if he doesn’t. All he has to do is get the “Orange” cars into Orange staging, and the “Blue” cars into blue staging, and I’m happy. 

If he has a good time doing it, that’s  pretty good too.


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