Freight House Operations

 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.

At what point do we do this waybill shuffling ? The idea of this waybill shuffling is to put all the bills for Chicago in those cars bound for Chicago. Those bills for Toledo would go into the Toledo car, and so on until every waybill is in a car card pocket. 

Some cars might not have any bills. These cars would simply get held over. Some destinations might have multiple cars assigned, and those cars would all be filled.
Some destinations might have more bills than cars. Those bills might get held over, or some procedure needs to be established to load an available car (I’m leaning towards holding the waybills over until next loading cycle).

Except for the sake of adding flavor to this operation, do the waybills need to list a commodity? Or can they simply read “Chicago”, “Toledo”, “St. Louis “, etc, etc, …?

On the topic of spotting cars in accordance with car service rules (This means a MTY car must be loaded with a load bound for this cars home road, or in its GENERAL direction, that is to say if you have a load for Los Angeles you put it into a SP boxcar, or a load for Portland, OR., might go in a GN boxcar) could each TRACK  at the freight house be dedicated to a BASIC compass heading: WEST, EAST, NORTH, SOUTH
And we leave it up to the person working the freight house job to spot the appropriate cars on the appropriate track.

Some leeway could be given to this job holder if he has more inbound cars from a particular compass heading, WEST cars would be pressed into service for SOUTH loads for example.

As the freight house switcher spots inbound cars the LCL waybills are pulled from the car card pocket and sorted into the various card boxes assigned to each track or door.

Some sort of file will need to be built that is adjacent to the freight house to facilitate this waybill reconciliation. 

Once the freight house is full up, that is a 40’ boxcar is spotted at every door spot, LCL waybills could then be inserted into the card pockets of the appropriate car. Once the LCL waybills are inserted into the car cards pocket, these cars would be deemed loaded and sealed and they would wait until the next pull cycle

Thoughts anyone?

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