Secondary Passenger Trains (For lack of a better term)

 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 the layout. They are never a burden to the dispatcher or the TTTO schedule. Whether they run or not is never a factor in the session. They only serve to give the Passenger Terminal Foreman job something to do, IF HE NEEDS IT.

There are four of these trains, all either with a handful of passenger cars but very heavy on head-end traffic, or they are fully Mail and Express trains. 

Each of these trains is tied in with the railroads that have a transfer presence on the west side of the layout: C&O, NYC, and B&O. I am considering adding more, but I’m afraid of adding so much extra work that the Terminal job becomes unmanageable. 

They amount to one train every two hours during those sessions where no passenger trains appear on my schedule. On those days the Terminal Job would be switching the various “Industries” in his area of responsibility (Post Office, REA, Creamery, Commissary, ETC), while, at the same time, driven by waybills, some cars he pulls would be billed to whichever train was due to depart next. 

At some appointed time, he would place power on this collection of cars and run it into an MTY track in West Staging. The target departure time would be “flexible”, so he need not drop everything to get the train out on time. If both train run at the end of the session,  great. If neither train runs, that’s okay too. If at the end of the session the cars for these trains are sitting on various make-up tracks, that too, is fine with me. I will dispose of the cars during staging.

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