I've recently gotten this little switching layout far enough along to start playing around with the intended purpose...switching cars and letting me run a mini-ops session for 30 or so minutes. Which is sometimes all one needs at the end of the day to relax after working and wrangling an almost-5 year old daughter. This layout is also going to serve as more of a fictional, "nostalgia" machine for me, compared to my Hudson Valley Lines layout, which I'm striving to keep fairly prototypical. So the industries on this layout have more to do with the various businesses that I think of when I think about "my" corner of Bergen County.
Here's where the layout currently stands. In the upper corner is what I'm calling Butterflake Bakery, which is actually a small bakery in Teaneck. But in my world, they've grown beyond the capacity of the original store, and now have a large bakery building dedicated to turning out cookies and other treats. Next track down is the mainline, then a small yard. Then there's a team track and a spur dedicated to The Record, which is a newspaper company based in Hackensack. They used to actually have rail service, so it is the one industry on here that isn't too far from reality. Finally, to the lower left is what will be a Hess gasoline distribution plant, drawing on my memory of seeing the Hess trucks and tanks in Bogota, right on the Hackensack River.
I also grabbed a short "bridge" section from my main layout that I wasn't using anymore and turned it into a cassette track (where the train is sitting in this picture). Since I'd like to also be able to take things outdoors for photography, I've decided to scenic the cassette. My goal is to give it a Meadowlands feel, although minus the trash and hidden bodies, however that could make for an interesting scene...
Following some well documented examples on the MRH forum on setting up JMRI Operations, I've now got the ability to generate switch lists. I've used both car cards/waybills and switch lists on layouts I operate on regularly, and I prefer switch lists. So I envision that I'll want switch lists for my bigger layout when I get to that point. Thus, having this small switching layout is helping me learn JMRI Operations without feeling too overwhelmed.
Here's the "train" manifest for loading cars from off-layout onto the cassette (same cars as in the picture above, sitting on the cassette). I've called storage JC (for Jersey City) to make it more obvious where the cars are coming and going.
And then here's the switch list that moves the cars from the cassette to the yard in Hackensack, and picks up the cars currently in the yard to return them to the cassette and eventually off-layout into storage:
The next step in the cycle would of course to be to generate the switch list for the local switcher to move cars between the yard and the industries. So this full cycle now lets me have cars show up from some other part of the country (represented by Jersey City), and make their way into Hackensack, get switched to an industry, and eventually make their way back out. I've only begun to scratch the surface of what is possible to do in Operations, so this is still rather basic, but I was excited to get to even this point and have it generally behaving the way I'd like. Next would be to add specific spots at the industries so that only cars of a certain type get delivered to those specific spots, and also adding in a schedule for some of the industries to determine how often they get switched.
-Brian.
