Blocking in the Steam Era: Part 3

 First let me take a second to wish every one a Happy Thanksgiving.

I think the entire gist of Mark’s clinic, as far as blocking goes, is that in the steam era, railroads did not “distant block”. By this I believe he means that no train is built with SPECIFIC blocks destined for locations beyond the division point. Yes there might well be a large block for “Points West”, but not specifically a “Denver” block.

Railroads simply pushed cars bound for destinations beyond the next division point IN THAT DIRECTION. If you keep moving cars TOWARD their destinations they eventually get there.

I believe traffic in the steam era was subject to delays due to dwell time in yards,  that in more contemporary eras railroads worked hard to eliminate.

All this seems obvious, a car goes that way-so send it that way.

Now I get to the topic of trains with dedicated purpose. A expedited LCL train or Perishable Produce for example. On the model railroad a train leaves the yard heading for EAST staging at 10:00am. The YM filled tonnage with loaded reefers. Was this a good choice? Two hours later the expedited reefer train runs east. On the model railroad, cars dwelling for two hours during a session, that’s nearly unbearable for model railroad YM’s. I mean, the measure of any good model railroad YM’s is an MTY yard. 

But in the imaginary world that exists “beyond the basement” the eastbound drag freight that departed at 10am, stops everywhere, and gets re-blocked everywhere, while the expedited produce train moves eastward across the country at a steady pace.

How can we communicate to our YM’s how to make better choices with our imaginary freight? And emulate the prototype practices of the railroads of our respective era’s?




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Wingedfoot Paper Part 2: Pulpwood

 On AIR1 a large, centrally located industry, was Wingedfoot Paper. As Jon Cure is fond of saying, a paper mill is the perfect Model Railroad industry. The major raw material is wood pulp. In 1952  pulpwood, cut and stacked like cord wood, was shipped to mills in a variety of cars. Nearly any car you can name was used, or modified in such a way as to become, a pulpwood hauler. Generally pulpwood was not valuable enough to travel far. The collection of pulpwood racks I have,  needs a great deal of repainting and re-lettering.  I just don’t think it’s likely to see Atlantic Coast Line cars hauling pulpwood into central WV! I have been toying with the idea of repainting cars from distant foreign roads and just adding a simplified lettering, using the premise that they are not for interchange. We’ll see. [4/19/22 this afternoon I went through the box of pulpwood cars. I think with only a few exceptions I’m going to have to repaint these flats and letter them for the AIR....
Read more

Freight House Operations: LCL and Freight Houses

 LCL is a huge source of revenue, car loading, and tonnage for railroads of the steam era. By the end of WWII numbers dropped fast, mainly due to trucks and roads. But to be honest LCL continued to be a big part of railroading. Today all that UPS traffic is LCL. There has been a lot of discussion of late about how to implement LCL  on a model railroad. My feeling is I do not want to perform a function by simply standing and counting off the seconds, pretending to off load LCL packages. What I did on AIR1 was to print up Waybills that simulated packages of LCL.  The peddler car was placed in the consist of a local, the car card for the peddler car had multiple bills in it, and as the local got to each depot, the train crew would check their LCL bills to check for a set out. You did not set out the car, you set out the BILL.  I extended this procedure for REA packages, US Mail, passengers, and now I plan to add this function for loaded milk cans, but more on all that l...
Read more

Freight House Operations: LCL from Foreign Road Freight Houses

 On AIR 1 while WM , N&W, CRR, and VGN trains had trackage rights over some or all of the layout, there were no freight houses for these foreign roads. Often in towns served by two or more competing lines one will find a freight house for each of these roads. In Winchester, VA the freight houses for the PRR and the B&O still stand today. On AIR 2 I do not plan model the extensive trackage rights as on the first layout. I plan to have these foreign roads to come on to the layout via either a short run of their track, visibly modeled, terminating at an interchange point, or simply a transfer from an off layout staging yard. In short fairly limited presence. However at each of these interchange points there should be some foreign road structures in their colors to give strong visual clues that these tracks do indeed belong to someone else. In a few cases, WM and N&W  for sure, some of these foreign road structures will be a freight house. Again, relying on the Kalmbac...
Read more