Enhancing operations with…: Part 1

 Over the last 15 years Al Daumann and I have been aggressively adding procedures to our respective operations to enhance them.

How many of you have, upon the start of the op session, drawn a passenger train? This has nearly universally been a big disappointment to me. I have to say TTTO operations has saved me, in general, in this respect. 

The process of negotiating a layout while operating under TTTO rules has brought the fun of just “running a train” back to me. Having said that with the vast majority of passenger train’s on layouts across North America, the process is very dull. You depart and upon arrival at the first station you stand and dwell a specified time. The idea is you are standing and pretending to let passengers on and off. At least with TTTO you compete against a clock.

So Al and I looked at this and created passenger tickets. I went to a great deal of trouble, reading Bill Darnaby’s article based on operations at the Batavia MRC. 

This is a demand driven system, and to be honest did not dovetail well with my operations that had no “Terminal”.

I did, at first, give the passenger trains a car to pick up or set out from house tracks across the layout. The Mail trains did the most of this, but every train did SOME switching. This was great, but I still found it to be lacking.

SO… I created “tickets” that instructed the train in question to pick up and set out “passengers” at each station. The “passengers” were represented by waybills simulating tickets. 

Now initially my passenger waybills included the type of tickets sold (That is a coach seat, a section; upper or lower, a roomette, a drawing room) and had a procedure for allowing these “passengers” to make connections to trains that served cities off-layout. I soon found this procedure to be a nightmare, and eventually discovered that it never mattered if the “passengers” bought a lower berth*.

What mattered was that passengers needed to get on or get off at particular stations. Coupled to this was a procedure which simulated flag stops, where a “passengers” got on or off the train at a little used, out of the norm, station.

After just a few op sessions doing this we soon determined that, in our opinion, we were on to something.

We then added mail bags, a way bill simulating a bag of mail that is to be picked up or dropped off at stations across the layout. This immediately lead to express that needed to be picked up and dropped off. Finally milk. Milk cans simulated by  waybills needed to be picked up full and returned empty.

Okay, take a breath. What I arrived at was a huge organizational mess. All this paper to be shuffled. Waybills on and off at every station. Cars to be picked-up and set-out hither and yone. I had many crew members who simply drove the passenger trains across the layout and did NONE of the additional work. During re-staging I’d find the passenger trains, and their train packet tucked into their arrival staging yard with not one of the cars switched, and none of the waybills picked up or set out.

It took time to sell this idea. That passenger trains did as much or more work than freight trains. 

What I ALSO realized was that about four of these additional procedures per train, per run, certainly not more than five, was ENOUGH. So I dialed it back a bit. Al’s layout, being much smaller than mine, in an effort to stretch his trains runs, added a bit more extra work per train than I did. But what we found was, much like giving medicine to your pet elephant,  “very little bit, goes v-e-r-y long way”*.

What we also found was that by adding these simple procedures to a passenger trains run, picking-up or setting-out a passenger*, dropping a bag of mail, switching an express reefer out at a depot house track, milk cans, or off loading a piece of express, these very passenger train specific procedures, really, really enhances the run.

Al’s layout has a roughly 90’ main line run, my AIR2 layout is 927’. Passenger trains on Al’s layout are FUN, and interesting. On my old AIR1 layout passenger trains were, in my opinion, very fun and very interesting. I think they will be the same on the new layout. 

In closing I need to state that no where else do we find this to be true. Al and I both get around. We travel to a lot of op sessions in a lot of different cities, regions, and countries. Nobody does this. Thats not true nore fair. Lots of layouts I go to have their passenger trains switch some cars.  I actually operate, from time to time on one layout, Pete Clarke’s East Broad Top where his passenger train drops mail bags, simulated with a waybill. But this seems to be nearly the only other case where layout owners have enhanced their passenger operations with any additional procedures that I have found personally.

*sleeping car berths. This procedure really only becomes useful in terminal operations where the seats and berths are totaled and the required cars are added to a base consist at the start of a passenger trains run. The person working the Passenger terminal has a base consist for each train that he must pull out of the coach yard. The cars required for each train are modified by the different ticket counts. That is he may find that he has sold enough tickets for #2 to add a coach and a sleeping car. He might also find he has limited resources at his coach yard and has to make decisions on what cars to use based on what cars he actually has in his coach yard. I need to add that the biggest opposition to this procedure was from passenger car aficionados who strenuously maintained that this was “not how it was done” on the prototype. There was no middle ground between prototype and playability. 

*Please see the movie “Gunga Din”.

* I want to point out that in nearly every case trains missed a passenger pick-up. Train crews just never take the time, the extra few seconds, to look at a depots bill box to see if there are any passengers to pick up. I think Al gets around this, SOMEWHAT, by having a larger style ticket. I use a standard sized waybill and format as a passenger ticket. Al’s passenger tickets are much taller. On my new layout I’m going with a taller, thinner passenger ticket format.