Building and operating the Atlantic Inland

  Let’s pretend I want to model a large freight house operation. At the start of the session the cars are all spotted ready to pull so as to connect with through trains. Once the cars are all pulled and spotted for pick-up by through trains, inbound cars must be brought back to the freight house and spotted for unloading and work. Let’s also pretend I wanted to include some sort of multiple waybills system, each bill represents a LCL shipment. Each LCL boxcar can hold a maximum of five LCL waybills. Also each door/spot loads outbound cars for a specific destination. I am not that particular what inbound car you spot at which door, in the real world car service rules might dictate which car can be spotted where. I might refine this system enough to require spotting a specific road name car at a particular door spot, but for now let’s just get a boxcar at every spot. Each inbound car delivers a card pocket full of waybills that must be sorted and reloaded into the appropriate cars. A...

 The LCL business was, and still is huge business for the railroads*1. The “brick and mortar” portion of the LCL business is the Freight House. Every railroad operated some sort of LCL operation, or nearly every line. Cars from one freight house to another were regularly scheduled. “The Chicago car runs daily”. These cars ran on time whether loaded to the gills or with one package*2. When I consider setting up my various freight houses I have dwelled long and hard about establishing a schedule of destinations. High volume destinations like large cities (think Chicago, New York, Richmond, St. Louis) might get multiple cars assigned. Smaller cities and towns might get only one car, or split a car between two or more destinations. This seems cumbersome. Additionally on the Atlantic Inland our tracks do not go physically to Cleveland, Toledo, Detroit, and Chicago. We go to Zanesville, OH., where we connect end to end with the W&LE. The Wheeling along with the NKP will forward our L...

 In the era I model, 1952, there was a consortium that had been created by several railroads and the Railway Express Agency, to manage and operate express refrigerator cars. The roads in this consortium were: ACL 49 cars,  ATSF 73, KCS 25,  GN 203,  NC&StL 10, PFE 149, PRR 358, SAL 18, REA (Made up of REA 595, General American 750, and CWRD 274) for a total of 2504 cars. Each of these lines turned their express reefers over to the REA. The REA managed them, found loads for them, and operated them as a nationwide pool. So a dozen roads.  Here is my question, how did an express reefer from a non-affiliated road find its way off line and across the country, AND BACK? And to follow up, did non-affiliated lines even ever make it off line? Let’s take the SLSF, the Frisco. I own a Frisco express reefer. Did the agent for the Frisco find a load for that express reefer that carried that express reefer across the country, and off the Frisco proper? Or did that car onl...

 This last weekend I attended an ops weekend put together by the Chicago Rail Group. I chose to drive, which in my opinion worked out well for me. Because my wife was not going with me I left early! I departed Winchester at 5 am on Wednesday February 19th. My original plan was to overnight in Columbus, OH., but I arrived in Columbus at 11:00am so after lunch I pressed on. The GPS told me I’d arrive at the base camp hotel at 4:00pm CT, but upon arrival at the Chicago city limits the traffic took a shit! I arrived at the hotel at 5:30pm. Dinner in the hotel restaurant was good, rigatoni, but expensive, so I never at there again all weekend. My room was very nice, my wife would have loved this hotel, so I rate the Double Tree highly. Thursday morning I ran an errand to the grocery store for some shaving gear, and stopped at Duncan Doughnuts for a coffee roll. My first Op Session was not until 4 pm, this was a so called bonus session, so I planned to go see the captured German Submarin...

 Last Saturday I was invited to operate at John King’s B&O Shenandoah Sub layout. John’s engines, rolling stock and physical plant all function like precision instruments. One interesting procedure John has that I am looking at stealing is the way he weighs cars. I ran train #97 which works towns along the route until you arrive at the end of the line at Strasburg Jct. At this point cars are interchanged with the Southern*. While working you pick up a handful of cars that have tags* in their car card pockets that read “WEIGH THIS CAR IN MILLVILLE”. Millville is at the other end of the branch, and to get these cars there requires a back haul. The point is all the car weighing is done at the scale at Millville. Once the cars are weighed the tags are removed, revealing the cars primary billing. These cars are then taken back to Brunswick, the originating staging yard, where it is implied that these cars are classified. This procedure reminded me of Al Daumann’s procedure for icing...

 I discussed Warehouses a couple years ago. A Warehouse Company is a business that leases space to other business that need additional storage or work space. They, generally, also lease the use of loading docks, and loading equipment. Obviously in our, model railroaders,  case these warehouses lease access to a railroad spur.  Most warehouses are not more than four or five stories high, but they make ideal subjects for back-drop buildings (You know, a building that is only an inch thick, built directly up against the back drop of your layout. Not much more than a wall of loading doors). On my old AIR1 layout the Overland Terminal Warehouse Co. * structure was 4’ long. I found that the Overland Terminal Warehouse, c.1925, had 89 separate tenants. I view these industries as “team tracks with associated structures”, because a warehouse can receive nearly any type of car. Let me illustrate. In my late career I dealt with a company called “Airgas”. We went to Airgas to rent cy...

 As a general rule nearly all express reefers were operated by REA. This included those cars lettered for individual railroads. Not all Express Reefers (Br) operated in this manner, but the railroads that operated the largest fleets of Br cars did this (SP, PRR, ACL to name three). As a layout owner who has strange tastes, I like the look of passenger trains made up of older cars, heavyweights, Pullman green, Mail & Express. I do not like publicity photo trains. I think there are huge opportunities to be had from switching passenger trains. Not just a few cars, but blocks of cars going to the Post Office, the REA, Produce Markets, Grocery Wholesalers. So I’m ready for this by owning a fairly large consists of head end cars.  When a train arrives from staging it will have a large block of head end cars to set out. Following sections will probably be a significant part of the op sessions. As discussed in past blogs, transfers from other roads of head end cars will be common....