MTY car requests

 I operated in Tulsa last weekend. One layout had a quite complicated MTY car request procedure.

MTY cars came back to the yard with bills the read either MTY to home road or hold for evaluation. The MTY to home road seems self explanatory, but the hold was to evaluate whether the car was suitable for re-loading or should it be rejected. The layout owner had the cars graded A-F, and the letter grade was on the car card. A-C are for boxcars, D is for reefers, E and F are for gondolas and flatcars respectively. The MTY car requests specified the car type, size and grade.

Types of cars for confiscation were boxcars, gondolas, and flatcars. The sizes seemed self explanatory, but there were multiple different sizes of boxcars, 36’ through 50’, as well as inside lengths, heights, door sizes etc,

Gondolas were inside length and capacity, and flats were length and capacity.

So all this was taken into consideration when filling MTY car requests.

There was one more thing, car service rules.

Loads should go into a car that is from a road where the load is going. For example a load going to Seattle, WA., could be loaded into a GN boxcar.

-SO-

When filling these MTY car requests we need to consider, the size and capacity of the car, its grade, and its home road.

To be honest the YM who is tasked with filling these requests does not, as a rule, have time to do this. The layout owner admitted to me that he usually fills the MTY car requests during re-staging, when no one is around. 

Now, if the operators are not going to get any play value out of a procedure, then it is not worth doing.

My idea for MTY car requests would be to streamline the procedure. The YM is provided with a stack of waybills at the start of the session. These bills represent MTY car requests. The MTY  cars would still be routed to the yard, where the YM, again IF HE HAS TIME, inserts a regular waybill into each car card pocket. Those MTY cars he does not re-bill get routed home MTY like normal. 

This track is then pulled and reclassified and all the cars get forwarded as per their waybills, either back to a new customer, or home as a returning MTY.

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