Additional Freight House Procedures

 After an ops weekend in Vancouver, BC. and a clinic given by a retired CP employee, I’m considering a change to my planned freight house procedures.

I will go into more detail from this clinic, but the speaker detailed how much bracing was used at the CP freight houses. After the inbound cars were unloaded, these cars needed to be pulled and Re-spotted at a clean out track.

At the P. E. Frantz elevator there is a clean-out and coopering track. This is what the retired CP employee was talking about. These cars from the freight house needed to have all the bracing removed. The good lumber was sorted out and saved to be re-used, and all the protruding nails and broken boards needed to be removed or repaired so these boxcars would be suitable for another LCL load.

So how do we utilize this knowledge at our model freight house? How does it affect playability?

Do we add a step to the procedure? For example:

Step 1: Spot inbound loads at the freight house

Step 2: Pull and sort the inbound waybills. During the sort we can pretend the cars are being unloaded.

Step 3: Pull all unloaded cars and spot them at the clean-out track. 

Step 4: Pulling MTY boxcars that have already been cleaned and coopered, we spot the MTY’s at the freight house following the AAR car service rules to the best of our ability.

Step 5: Insert the sorted LCL bills into the car card pockets of the MTY boxcars.

Step 6: Pull and forward the LCL boxcars appropriately.

Can the Freight House Foreman accomplish this in one session? Can he switch the other Freight House’s and Freight Consolidator as well?

I don’t know.


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