Freight House Operations and LCL

 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-

Then again that might work too. If individual LCL bills come in during each session and are collected in a box at the Freight House, they could be collected in time to go into a peddler car’s card pocket on those days when the local is running.

Big picture, however, I’m seeing these Freight House’s to be a series of locations routing boxcars in between each other as well as on and off layout.

Primarily there will be several Atlantic Inland Freight House’s, the three largest facilities located at the West end of the layout in Charleston. Additionally each of the connecting railroads that have a presence on the layout (NYC, C&O, B&O, VGN, N&W and WM) will have a freight house which will send and receive cuts of cars to and from the AIR or on and off layout.

This network of ten or more Freight House’s will be involved in a seemingly random, criss-crossing traffic of cars, a seething mass of cars bubbling and streaming back and forth just below the calm surface of daily traffic.

Yeah right.



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