Oregon Joint Line N Scale

[coldriver]

Dean, I notice that you are using car tabs.  Can you share the nature of the operation, creation of the tabs, and whether operators prefer them to car cards or switchlists.  Thanks for any insight.

John

Sorry John, been travelling and sort of dropped out of sight for a bit so I just saw your post (thanks Jeff for stepping in!).  Chris Palmieri put together a nice explanation of my car tab system - https://meridianspeedway.weebly.com/car-tabs-on-np-oregon-joint-line.html

If I was in a larger scale I'd probably have never gone there, and my original intent was to replace them with a more sophisticated system eventually.  But frankly, they work damn good.  They are easy to learn and easy to use.  There's no squinting to read N scale car numbers.  You never have the annoyance of spending (at least it sometimes seems...) as much time sorting car cards as you spend sorting the cars themselves. 

Yup, there's an aesthetic downside, but no one seems to complain, and frankly I've got far more people wanting to operate than what I can accommodate (so you'd better not complain ).  Essentially they act as two cycle waybills and most of the tabs just get flipped after a session if they've reached their destination.  But it's not at all repeating scenarios in my case, because some cars take one session to make a cycle, while others take up to three sessions per cycle because cars often transfer from yard to yard (and sometimes even a third yard) on my layout before they get to their final spotting location.   I also reduce the visual impact by not putting any tabs on cars moving from one end of staging to the other on the same train (why would you?), which probably represents at least 50% of my traffic.  And finally there are certain car types which more or less serve as their own tabs.  For instance, I have a lot of woodchip traffic on the OJL and all loaded woodchip cars go to a single destination - the pulpmill at Scanlon on the Oregon & Northeastern RR.  So there's no need to put tabs on these cars, the switching instructions at every yard on the OJL make it clear that all loaded woochip cars need to route towards Scanlon.  The empty woodchip cars need tabs to get back to multiple lumber mills for loading of course, but these cars are nice and deep so you typically don't see the tabs unless you're looking straight down.  Probably the biggest downside is removing the tabs for photography.   

[coldriver]

Interesting idea but it might create a singularity. Not having a map of the OJL, my line would erase part of the SP&S and all of the GN from the Inside Gateway and extend further into California than the GN did, and its northern terminus would be situated to take on run through from the MILW. So it might erase some of the parts of the OJL in the process.

Yes, definitely sounds like some overlap - the Northern Pacific side of the OJL is an Oregon Trunk/Inside Gateway competitor extending south from Pasco through central Oregon to a connection with the WP and SP somewhere west of Elko.  The GN side splits off the Oregon Trunk and follows Trout Creek through Antelope (aka Rajhneeshpuram) to a junction with the NP line in the Spray area to form the Oregon Joint Line and then splits off near Burns to head east towards their own WP/SP connection in eastern Nevada. 

[coldriver]

Finally got to finish Part 2 of my Monument Yard video.  Can't believe how well received it's been - yes I would like to make more of these scripted videos with multiple characters, but at some point I need to resume work on the layout....

[jagged ben]

Love it.

[nkalanaga]

Antelope (aka Rajhneeshpuram)"  I've been there - many years ago, when it was just "Antelope".  Nice scenery for a railroad.

[Rossford Yard]

The great thing is, Dean's "playbook" for switching Monument eliminates most need for talking and verbal instructions. You get a few calls from dispatch.

One of Dean's strengths, as a BNSF employee, is that his train lists and playbooks, even his switch schemes balance good information and schedules with flexibility.  For example, at Monument, if the fleet of trains is late for some reason, he has a dozen tasks, some of which you can move on to do to keep busy until the trains arrive.

Similar to cars, his yard tracks have magnetic tabs, so instead of always assigning track X to the Y location, the yardmaster selects from the open (or most open) tracks matching track length to anticipated number of cars.  When a track becomes available after a train leaves, it can be used for whatever needs to be switched next, and you just place the magnetic bar over that track on the yard diagram.

But, it does help that Dean walks around a lot, answering any questions that he has somehow and rarely NOT made intuitively obvious.

[Jbub]

Make me happy now! I love the story line , it makes watching a switching very enjoyable.

[shark_jj]

Dean, thanks for responding.  One quick question, in order to get the two colour tags are you masking each of those 1/2 inch pieces then painting them. 

[coldriver]

Dean, thanks for responding.  One quick question, in order to get the two colour tags are you masking each of those 1/2 inch pieces then painting them.

Yessir.  In addition to painting the tabs to code them I've even gone so far to as paint the sides of the tabs in some cases to better blend in with the roof tops.  I've even experimented with weathering the tabs!

[coldriver]

I was never really happy with the Union Pacific Burns Branch staging built into the fascia - it wasn't hidden, but certainly had limited vertical clearance. So with the ongoing work at Snowline I decided to try something new - hang the staging track on the front of the fascia. It seemed like this might be a really bad idea but it survived the first session without incident. It's only two inches wide so it doesn't take up much aisle space. It'd be tougher to pull this off in a bigger scale.

[DKS]

I was never really happy with the Union Pacific Burns Branch staging built into the fascia - it wasn't hidden, but certainly had limited vertical clearance. So with the ongoing work at Snowline I decided to try something new - hang the staging track on the front of the fascia. It seemed like this might be a really bad idea but it survived the first session without incident. It's only two inches wide so it doesn't take up much aisle space. It'd be tougher to pull this off in a bigger scale.

Outstanding.

[packers#1]

The Latta Subdivision layout in Great Model Railroads this year has a similar concept with 3 or 4 tracks in front of the fascia; looks like a good concept!

[Ed Kapuscinski]

That was one of the ideas I had contemplated for staging for Windsor Street. I never figured out how to fit it in with the existing benchwork though so I went in another direction.

I still really like the concept.

[mu26aeh]

That was one of the ideas I had contemplated for staging for Windsor Street. I never figured out how to fit it in with the existing benchwork though so I went in another direction.

I still really like the concept.

I thought about something like that for an extension to the MMID interchange at Emory Grove

[Jbub]

I hope this means there is another operations video coming up. You do as great job with them, they are very entertaining.