All of my car movement were planned with the good old four-way paper waybill and a car card. My layout had staging for both east and west end terminals, so I could arrange for fairly realistic bridge movements, based on the WM's participation in the "Alphabet Route".
Without getting bogged down in the rules that were in effect on June 24th 1971, (or whatev) I would bill my "off road" cars in the following way. Let's use a Norfolk and Western boxcar as an example:
1. From NW shipper in the midwest, to a warehouse on my layout. (Eastbound movement)
The car comes from west end staging, is set out at Ridgeley (my live yard on the layout) and put into a local that serves the customer in question.
2. Empty is billed to return to NW interchange (former PWV) at Connellsville
The car gets picked up by the local, and put in a block at Ridgeley to be added to the next thru train to the west end.
3. From NW shipper in Chicago, thru movement to consignee in eastern Pennsylvania.
NW maintained the Alphabet Route traffic right into the Chessie era, so lots of traffic moved from west to east via this routing. Now the car is blocked into the next Alpha Jet headed to Rutherford, and rolls across the layout from West staging to East staging, without stopping, other than for a crew change at Ridgeley.
4. Empty car From consignee in eastern PA, (or it could be loaded for shipment west) billed as a thru movement to West Staging.
Basically the same movement as 3, only in reverse.
The car ends up in west staging where it began, flip the card over, and start all over again.
I found this method to be an effective way to realistically run longer thru trains that picked up and set out blocks, but didn't tie up the yard getting fully broken down and put back together. It also helped really mix the traffic on my manifest freights, and sometimes the luck of the draw would have either a whole lot of cars that just passed through, or a whole lot of cars that had to be dealt with in the yard.
And just like the WM did, when I had a hotshot freight that came in a little under capacity, I could add a block of empty hoppers to send back west with it, or pick up some other terminal traffic that was heading in the right direction. I always had trains running between 20 and 30 cars, had to make sure they had the right kind of power to make the trek on both my modeled world and the prototypical route. I also had a couple of cars that required less than four movements (captive on line shippers, etc.) which kept things mixed up pretty well. The additional possibilities of two on-layout interchanges and the Thomas Sub also kept it from getting boring.
I'm not sure how all that translates to all the technology based switch lists and so forth, but I really enjoyed the system I devised for operating my layout. I wish I had gotten to do it more, because it really worked effectively.
Lee
