Building and operating the Atlantic Inland

 Let me start this off by stipulating that, for the most part, none of us NEED any more trains. For example, ME. I believe I own somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 covered hoppers. So this Christmas Santa naturally brought me six NYC covered hoppers from Rapido. The more Hoppers, for example, I get the larger the fleet becomes, the more diluted the cars get, submerged in the thundering herd, the less noticeable a cool new model actually becomes.   Let’s say I picked up fifty (50) coal hoppers some Christmas. All painted and lettered for the AIR with different numbers. If that happened tomorrow the fleet would only grow by 1/8 or roughly 12.5% . If it was to happen again the next day, another fifty cars. That would only grow the fleet by 11.1%. So what is the real lesson here? Next time you are considering buying more coal hoppers (Or in fact any car type),   buy 100 at a time. So what did Santa bring YOU?

 I did a quick calculation of the number of cars that will cross the layout between freight houses, each session. 68. Obviously this is a lot, and what I foresee is that some of these cars will not move every session. Additionally I’m not actually sure that these cars will make their trip in one session. I’m assuming that some cars,  for various reasons, will dwell in a yard, having missed a connection. Others will get in trains that will, for whatever reason, fail to complete their run, or not get worked upon arrival. This leads to the question if say 25% of the cars are still in transit when I re-stage, will this cause a glut? So do I need to not only check the various car spots at originating freight houses, but do I need to take a look at yards and trains in transit, and get car counts from there? Slow handling one session, followed immediately by a second session of fast transit times might yield 125% car spotting’s in the second session. On AIR1 I simply left these situa...

 It’s no secret that I think LCL Operations should be a large part of every Steam Era layout, I’d say any layout set in the era 1900 to 1970. What I’ve found is that the majority of layouts featuring LCL do not use separate LCL bills. I will not either.  My LCL Ops will feature something in the neighborhood of 200 cars in a session. With that number of cars I think it would be unworkable to ask the operator to deal with multiple waybills with each car. I think I’ve described it as “moving cars, not bills”. I think the operator will get the idea. I would like to have the Freight House Job have a peddler car or two to prepare for the local, but again I’m not sure what’s the best way to accomplish this. I’m thinking that it might be best to fill this cars card pocket with the individual LCL bills during staging, as opposed to having bills come to the freight house via individual cars, and having the Freight House Foreman pull and collect these bills during each session. -BUT- The...

 We hear this over and over again, the prototype does not like complexity. Neither in is procedures nor its physical plant. Expensive and complex track arrangements installed to serve a customer,  that might reasonably receive one car per week, are simply not going to happen.  This is absolutely the opposite of what model railroaders, in fact, do. I’m getting tired of hearing, “But this was what the prototype actually did”, to explain a switchback that only accommodates one small engine  and one car, needed to reach an industry receiving 24 cars.  I must be the only person who thinks that these operations are an annoying nuisance, and are no fun.  I’m sure most of my readers, who probably have MUCH better things to do, are familiar with John Allen’s  “Time-Saver” switching plan.  While this is an enjoyable game, I do not think it was designed to be part of a layout. Traveling through a complex system of switch-backs in order to spot two cars at a ...