Tehachapi, BC

[Van Horne]

Mark, I was being facetious!  That is more the perception of jealous easterners, than our reality!  It is still a really old picture, though.

Dave

[mark dance]

Mark, I was being facetious!  That is more the perception of jealous easterners, than our reality!  It is still a really old picture, though.

Dave

ahhhh...right.  Let's not tell them what it is *really* like here as that will just drive the real estate prices up more!  Got it (wink wink nudge nudge)

md

[Van Horne]

ahhhh...right.  Let's not tell them what it is *really* like here as that will just drive the real estate prices up more!  Got it (wink wink nudge nudge)

md

Not to mention traffic is bad enough already!

Dave

[GaryHinshaw]

It is still a really old picture, though.

Indeed it is.  This was the best shot I could find that showed the mountains and the city together.  Note that the spread of development has hardly changed at all in those ~25 years, which illustrates my point exactly. 

[GaryHinshaw]

<WARNING> Long detailed post about restaging concepts. </WARNING>

Here is how I'm thinking of restaging trains between sessions on TBC.  I would like to avoid merely turning trains between sessions and running them back and forth.  Here is a possible car forwarding scheme for through trains:

I think it makes sense to generate car demand by train symbol (e.g. BNSF southbound manifest) where each train has a statistical length and mix of car types appropriate to that symbol.  The makeup of a particular train can be generated by a spreadsheet quite easily.  (I would not prescribe specific car numbers, rather just car types and amounts for each train.)   I can also use a spreadsheet to generate a train's initial position on the line (be it in staging or out on the line.)  So that's straightforward.

The question is where to go to fulfill the demand for those cars.  On the prototype, there are four endpoints to the line: UP north, BNSF north, UP south, BNSF south.  Ideally a train that terminates in any of those endpoints would evaporate into a pool to supply future demand.  On the layout, I have North (Bakersfield), South (Mojave), and Storage, and during a session, some terminating trains will move from North or South into Storage as capacity is reached (recall that there are short connections between all three yards, so fiddling between any pair of them is simple).

The most human-accessible yard is North (Bakersfield), so I think a workable plan for a "pool" is to fiddle all terminated manifest trains of a given symbol class (e.g. manifest, intermodal, etc.) into North and draw new trains from that pool of terminated trains.  I can then send that class of trains out to their assigned locations and repeat for the other types of symbols.  (Most of those moves would be short yard hops.)  Unit trains like grain, coil steel, and auto racks would probably just be shuffled a bit and have their length changed per demand since I don't have a very large reservoir of those cars to draw from.  This approach requires that I don't overload staging so it remains fluid enough to shuffle a class of trains.

I also have the ability to keep a pool of cars on an offline shelf above Bakersfield, where temporary north staging is now.  (That shelf could also retain a connection to the mainline, but it would be in the middle of the line, and thus a few rail miles from either North or South.)   I could fiddle cars on and off that shelf with the 0-5-0, conveniently expanding my pool substantially. 

This scheme becomes vastly easier to implement once Bakersfield is actually built, but I can probably try it out with the existing yards, the main drawback being that temporary north staging is many rail miles away from the permanent South & Storage yards, so it would be slow to return those trains to the pool.

Comments?  Are there any well-known schemes out there for restaging through freights? 

TLDR? 

[wm3798]

On mine, I had a similar operational arrangement, only it was three headed on the layout... five headed in concept.  I had the West end at Connellsville represented as a staging yard, the other west end as an active yard at Elkins, and the main yard at the east end was Ridgeley, where the eastern lines went forth to Baltimore, represented by the big staging yard under the paper mill.  Other eastbound traffic was directed to the Reading via the Lurgan Sub, and York and the Hanover Sub via the same staging yard, providing the fourth and fifth heads.

As for re-staging, it was pretty straightforward.  The trains that went East ultimately had their car cards turned and became westbounds.  When I was feeling particularly feisty, I would pull the train out of staging and re-block it based on the new car cards, run it around the layout for a few laps while drinking a beer, then park it back in the hole where it would be blocked and staged, ready for the next operation session.

It was important for me to have car cards for each car, since in addition to the through trains, I also had a lot of on-layout switching, and blocks that would go from one route to the other.  If all the BNSF traffic stays on the BNSF, and likewise the UP, then it should just be a simple matter of whatever goes "up" must eventually come back "down".  i.e., my grain train would run from Connellsville to Baltimore, then eventually return as a block of empties heading back to the midwest.  Likewise coal... but that involved pulling the loads for the westbound moves.   I would also have coal from Elkins hit the yard and be combined with other cars to go East on the Lurgan to the Reading to serve the steel mills in Allentown and Bethlehem.  Eventually, they'd have to come back west empty, and be combined at Ridgely with empties arriving from the pier at Baltimore to go back to the mines either at Elkins or on the West Sub.

If you have a major functional yard, then that would become the focal point for shifting your blocks of cars.  If your computer program can adequately identify the blocks of cars, then it should be pretty close to car order ops, only with blocks instead of individual cars.  As for staging, if you can access it to fiddle, you can re-block trains before they come back out.  But in the end, it's going to be the rolling stock you send in there that will ultimately come back out.  Having extra storage where you have to do a bunch of work in staging is probably over-thinking it.

Lee

[mark dance]

I would concur with Lee not to overthink this, especially when it comes to through trains. 

My thoughts would be that without a yard on the layout where trains are classified, through trains really are just railfanning trains so only need to look "right".  And my experience has been even with layouts that use 4 cycle waybills operators rarely see the cycle of cars so the car routing is primarily for the layout owner...which I appreciate by the way.  If you stay away from the temptation to really visible cars like those with really bold colours or distinctive tags the operators will be unlikely to notice that trains are being recycled or are not blocked correctly. (one of the benefits of my prototype is that >60% of the cars moved were 40' CP box cars most in box car red!)

That doesn't mean that you shouldn't pursue a scheme that assures trains are blocked properly but just be cognizant that the extra mental and fiddling work between sessions is for you and no one else!

Now the origination, routing and destination of "shorts" is a different matter all together...

my $0.02

md

[Smike]

Vancouver is $$ for a good reason, it is (IMHO) the best city in the world to live. In fact I just passed through it the other day while returning from a trip in Squamish B.C. Gary you are one very fortunate individual to live there. My only regret was not having an ounce of spare time to swing over to visit the layout first hand.  Next trip!

While driving through downtown we saw a classic convertible with the top down parked on the street (try that in NYC).  Working on seeing what it would take to apply to work at ARC’TERYX and transfer from the US. (so far a lot of hurdles, but at least the wife is onboard  )

[Santa Fe Guy]

Sorry Smike. Melbourne was just voted the best city to live in in the world. So come on down the weathers fine.
Rod.

[coldriver]

For my through trains I swap out open loads for empties (lots of lumber on my layout) and then I have a small staging-fiddle yard of oddball/one-off cars that I use for minor swap outs.  Putting a yellow Frisco boxcar into a almost solid train of SP boxes completely changes the look of the train just by swapping out one car.  I would yank that Frisco box out of the train after one run - it's too distinctive and uncommon to have been seen regularly in central Oregon. 

[GaryHinshaw]

I think my last post made things sound more complicated (over-thought) than it was.  I really boils down to two ideas:

1. Generate demand with a spreadsheet.  This is straightforward and it would be designed to produce a prototypical set of trains for the next session.

2. Create a pool of available cars from terminated trains to fulfil the demand in step 1.  The key point here is that the close physical proximity of the 3 yards (and the shelf) makes pooling the terminated trains easy.  It should also make swapping loads/empties fairly easy as well.

I agree that this re-staging is mostly for my benefit, but that's ok.    The larger challenge in all of this is to make the road jobs interesting for the crews.  That is where pusher ops, some online work, and events like bad-order set-outs will come into play.  I'm also still thinking about ways to make Bakersfield at least a semi-active online yard.

[GaryHinshaw]

Gary you are one very fortunate individual to live there. My only regret was not having an ounce of spare time to swing over to visit the layout first hand.  Next trip!

I am fortunate indeed.  But shame on you for not looking us up!

Lee, reading your description makes me really wish your WM layout was still active.    Thanks for all the feedback gents.

[Smike]

I had exactly 30 minutes of spar time from my appointment with ARC'TERYX to sitting on a plane coming home 

I promise I will be back with a real vacation schedule. 

[Van Horne]

Sorry Smike. Melbourne was just voted the best city to live in in the world. So come on down the weathers fine.
Rod.

It actually wasn't voted such.  This is something that the Economist does every year based on a bunch of criteria (a grab bag of objective and subjective) that are not necessarily meaningful to any individual on an equally weighted basis.  Having said that, I'd love to visit as I have two nephews living there.  Just as soon as they install multiple ski hills within the city limits, I'll think of moving!

Dave

[C855B]

I had exactly 30 minutes of spar time ... sitting on a plane ...

Yeah... aren't unassigned seats a pain?