Building and operating the Atlantic Inland

 About two years ago I tried again, to get some volunteers to build some car kits. These kits are P2K, Red Caboose, and Inter Mountain kits. You’d think by now I would have learned. I personally am prohibited from building car kits by the bi-laws of the Atlantic Inland Railway. Our motto, where model cars is concerned is, “If I can’t get it out of the package and onto the rails in under ten minutes, I do not want to see it!”. RTR all the way. In any case because I still own a handful of kits,  I sent out a plea for builders and got one reply. This modeler built one car, beautifully I might add, and stopped. It took a year to get the rest of the cars back. The next volunteer took four Red Caboose W&LE Boxcar kits and did to them what the Germans did to Poland in 1939. When he was done with them, they were finished. I did not let him touch any more kits.  Every few years I need to re-learn this lesson, if you want something done right, buy it Factory assembled.

 Refrigerator Cars Reefer operations have an enormous potential for enhancement with waybills. A reefer comes out of staging and gets spotted at your packing house for loading. Next session you pull it and route it off layout. Here’s a term vital to reefer operations, “Protective Services”. A protective service is adding ice. Either by pre-icing the car before loading it, icing it after loading. Re-icing the car along its route, or adding top ice, a layer of crushed ice, over the top of several types of produce. Part of protective service is also adding salt to the brine tanks to enhance the cooling effects of the iced brine. It’s opening, OR closing, ventilator hatches. And it’s adding heaters to cars to keep the temperature of the car UP. All of these protective services are GENERALLY performed at the ice dock. In the interests of play value, adding an action bill to a car card pocket to divert a reefer car, or reefer block, to the ice dock is about all you might accomplish here....

 I’m probably the only modeler who did this, but when I was decalling cars for my free lanced Atlantic Inland, and because I did not maintain a master numbering data sheet, I duplicated numbers on some cars. Because I usually did cars in mass batches in one case I decalled one number on one side and a different number on the other, by accident* Originally, way back in the early 1990’s I had a hand written list. Once I got to the point where I had over a hundred cars of the same type*, this became cumbersome. The final straw was when a computer train inventory system I was using, which I liked very much, crashed along with that computer. I recently established a new inventory system on Excell. But I did not have an “At a glance” number list for my home road.  I rectified that a few nights ago, and this system, while not terribly technologically advanced, it allows me to expand my list and add car numbers in between those cars already established. Now, I have ONLY ginned up a li...

 Livestock. There is actually quite a bit you can do with livestock cars. What you can’t or shouldn’t is probably more important. Livestock shipments in the steam era were the highest priority shipments on any railroad. Even more than passenger trains.  Okay, the simple things first. Loaded stock cars should always be blocked on the head end, directly behind the locomotives. When switching, loaded stock cars should NEVER be in the “Handle”, that is when you are backing into a spur to spot or pull a car there should never be loaded stock cars in the cut of cars you are switching with. Loaded stock cars should be switched the minimum to get the job done. The slack action of switching can injure the animals.  At the yard loaded stock cars should be set aside on a stock track if possible, but set aside. Then the general merchandise cars in the train can be broken down and blocked. Animals can only be confined for 28 hours, then they must be unloaded for five hours rest, fed a...