Building and operating the Atlantic Inland

 “People wed their ideas with far more devotion than their wives or husbands”. I was devoted to the idea of a coal prep plant. I’m still not ready to abandon it completely, however, it will not be making an appearance on AIR2 as it was designed and discussed all along. Here are my reasons for dropping this idea.  Manpower. This idea would require more operators, at least one additional permanent crewman.  Space. This idea would require a significant amount of space. Now let me explain this a bit further. I HAVE the space on the layout plan. What I don’t have is the floor space. The crew working the prep plant would be occupying the same floor space, for the entire session, as crews working other industries located on DIFFERENT levels of the layout. I’ve made this mistake before, two crews working industries directly above or below each other. NEVER AGAIN. Additionally I could not figure out how to make the prep plant work for the entire session. Because this is an HO scal...

 Several years ago I had the privilege of attending a Pro Rail event in the region around Detroit. While there I was made aware of a round robin group made up of contemporary era layouts, led by Bruce Carpenter*, representing various different roads. Each of these layouts had numerous points of interchange between other layouts.  So far this idea seems fairly mundane, except this group chose an interesting solution to interchanging these cars. If you, for example, had a UP layout that interchanged with the BNSF, you routed cars for BNSF to the appropriate staging yard on your layout. Upon the completion of your op session, you packed up the cars for the BNSF into a box, and sent them, via UPS, to the BNSF layout in the round robin group. The BNSF sometime between sessions, received a box from you, unpacked it, placed the cars on the layout, and forwarded them as per their waybills. If you were a CN layout, and you had cars for a DRGW layout, but did not directly connect, you m...

 I have a 24-Hour Schedule. I run a 1-1 Clock. It would take a 24-Hour Session to run my entire schedule in one day. Each session is four hours of that schedule. It takes six sessions to equal a full day.  Does any of that make sense? Anyway…  two passenger trains (or is it four?), #1& 2 and #15 & 16, are scheduled at nearly the same time of day on my schedule in order to place them at the passenger terminal at the same time. The reason for this is because these trains exchange so many cars. So #1 and #15 are on layout at the same time, and #2 and #16, the same. Each pair run roughly 12 hours apart. Because of this there are op sessions where there are no passenger train running at that moment in time. The passenger terminal job, The Passenger Terminal Foreman, is a bit light at those times.  It’s because of this I created several passenger trains that must be built, but that simply run from the Passenger terminal, WEST, into staging. They do not run across t...

 I’m making noises about setting up the train workshop. It’s a process that with every step forward I’m finding I need to take several steps back, and a couple to the side. I have to return to the original plan where I was working on the stair well and the “foyer”, or entry, to the train room.  If I get these things complete I can begin emptying boxes of art, collectibles, and books. Once I’ve cleared these items up, I’ll have considerable room to begin another phase.  Right now every time I go down into the train room, I’m stepping over tools and materials that I was using to do the walls of the stairwell. Once past them I moving boxes full of books, pictures, oil cans, signs and detritus out of the way to get to a box containing passenger car trucks.  Then in an effort to find the passenger cars that I want to put the trucks on, I need to move all those assorted boxes back in the opposite direction. Just finding a square of table-top space 24” x 24” to work on is a...