Operations on the Rio Grande Southern First District

[Dave V]

OK, gonna keep this separate from my engineering thread.

I model the first 66.2 miles of the Rio Grande Southern, from Ridgway to Rico, minus the Telluride Branch:



During most of its life, the RGS used Rico as a division point.  In the early days, passenger trains ran through, but most of the time freight that was traversing the entire line (such as oil loads north from the D&RGW at Farmington, NM via Durango headed to Montrose, also on the D&RGW narrow gauge and empties return) would be handed off at Rico.  In some years and for some applications, Dolores served as a division point, but forget that...it's too complicated.  So, I envision operating my layout...the First District...as if it were completely independent railroad from the RGS Second District.  That is to say that anything coming from the south to Rico whether from any point on the D&RGW from Alamosa or from the remaining 96 or so miles of the RGS Second District will be treated the same, and vice versa for southbound cars.

Ridgway is the main yard.  With a few exceptions I would see most cars when empty heading back to Ridgway.  Empty tanks should go to Durango, but otherwise I think this works.  Get those cars back to the D&RGW to avoid per diem rates.

One on-line load that must go south is carnotite ore from Placerville (well, really Vanadium, but close enough).  It contains uranium, and since it's World War II time, that carnotite ore goes to the Durango smelter for refining in secret.  So it has to go south with the empty tank cars when there are any.  Some empty flats would go to Dolores to the big McPhee sawmill too I suppose.

Here's the trackplan:



One change in the works is the carnotite loader I plan to install at Placerville with a short spur.  For now we can load that at the RGS Freight Warehouse.

OK, so here are the online industries/destinations and what they need/ship:

Ridgway:  RGS Yard:  Receives company coal in gondolas for engine service. 
Ridgway stock pens:  Receives/ships cattle/sheep if handoff to D&RGW and Montrose stockyards is delayed.

Placerville:  Conoco/Texaco bulk oil facility: Receives refined oil in tank cars. 
RGS freight warehouse:  Receives just about anything in any type of car except tank cars.  Includes perishables in reefers on rare occasion.  Ships bagged ore concentrates.
Primos Chemical Co:  Ships carnotite ore in boxcars, bagged or loose (if car is equipped with door boards).

Ophir:  Alta Mine:  Ships bagged ore concentrates in boxcars, bagged or loose (if car is equipped with door boards).
House track (same spur as Alta mine):  Receives mining equipment/supplies in boxcars, flats, or gons.  Ships bagged local ore concentrates in boxcars.

Rico:  Rico-Argentine Pro Patria Mill:  Ships ore concentrates in boxcars, bagged or loose (if car is equipped with door boards). 
Rico Public Ore Sampling Works:  Occasionally receives chemicals and equipment shipped in boxcars.
Rico public coal bins:  Occasional receives gons with coal.
Rico ore dump:  Ships ore in boxcars, bagged or loose (if car is equipped with door boards).
Rico house track:  Receives just about anything in any type of car except tank cars.  Includes perishables in reefers on rare occasion.
(Not modeled but should have been) Rico coal pocket:  Receives company coal in gondolas for engine service. (this one I may just deliver the gon to the house track until I figger it out)
Rico stock pens:  Ships sheep and cattle in stock cars, single or double deck.

Passenger, mail, and LCL service is primarily provided by the Galloping Goose, although I have only one Goose.  So, would do a Ridgway-Rico turn.  I can also do full steam passenger service as necessary, either with native RGS equipment or leased D&RGW equipment.

I also have MoW cars which will typically be cut-in to regular trains as necessary per prototype.

On the real RGS in my era (1938-1947) all trains operated as extras except for the Galloping Goose which ran on timetable.

So...there's the situation.

[MVW]

Very interesting, Dave. Looking forward to hearing what the average train length will be, and the overall schedule of operations.

Are you designing solely for solo ( ), or do you envision more than one operator at a time?

Thanks for sharing the process!

Jim

[wm3798]

If everything ran as extras, then there's your operating scheme.  As needed when needed.  Use a system that generates switch lists, then stage you thru oil or ore trains to work around, and you'll be all set.

For a wonderfully crafted bucolic layout like yours, anything more complex would be overkill.  You've built the Ma&Pa.  You just haven't admitted it yet.

Lee

[John]

This actually would lend itself very nicely to the JMRI ops program .. it has the ability to generate traffic based on schedules, with a variability factor .. for example, the coal dealer usually gets 2 cars per week, but maybe every once in a while needs 3 or 4 .. you set the random value, and periodically when you build the train, it throws the extra cars in ..  or maybe just sends you one ..

[Dave V]

Thanks for the input so far.

@MVW , I would guess 95% of the time it'll just be me, so I think operating a First District extra as a local to Rico and back is probably how most sessions will go.  I do want capacity to entertain a few operators at once...although I'm realizing that the passing siding at Lizard Head is really short for opposing meets (but is bracketed by single deck trestles, so...).

So, folks are saying switch lists, and that's not the first time I've heard that.  @Ed Kapuscinski have discussed this in the past and from what little I understand about them, they'd be perfect.  As I said, most days I would operate a local out to Rico and back and just do all the switching along the way.  Some restrictions exist...would prefer to work Ophir as a trailing-point with northbounds only.  There was a passing siding on the other side of the Ophir Loop from Bridge 45A (right about where Lizard Head is on my plan) but I'd prefer to leave that as Lizard Head.

That said, "just use switch lists" is where paralysis sets in.  From everything I've found online--including those Ron's Trains N' Things operations videos--you still use car cards and waybills with your switchlists.  Generating the waybills and the lading to and from off-railroad locations is the hardest part for me.  I *get* that coal from Hesperus on the Second District gets sent to Ridgway yard for engine service.  Done.  But let's say the music teacher in Placerville orders a boxcar full of pianos.  Where did that come from or does it matter?  It'll have to come in via the D&RGW either at Ridgway or Durango, so the origination point would probably be Alamosa or Salida where the pianos were transloaded from standard gauge to narrow gauge...  Sigh.

JMRI...  I have a version of it for decoder programming.  Would that also do this switch list generation?  I imagine the setup takes forever but that's a one-time investment.

I do have "another level" available to me if I so desire.  I think when I get started, a boxcar's just a boxcar (regardless of whether they're D&RGW 3000-series or the PhIII ex-C&S RGS boxcars, they're the same size and same capacity...convenient!).  However, D&RGW 3000-series often had a black tack board next to the door and sometimes the car has special instructions.  Blackstone allows you to choose which instructions go on which tack boards for cars so equipped.  Some cars were equipped with 2 x 12 boards across the doorway for loading loose ore directly into the car.  These have instructions "for ore loading only" and other cars might have instructions for agricultural products only.  FWIW, a lot of farm products went over the D&RGW narrow gauge and the RGS was famous for shipping pinto beans...although most bean traffic went from Second District destinations south to Durango and away from my modeled part of the line.

[Philip H]

JMRI has a companion for operations that can generate switchlists.  I don't have it but it gets regularly mentioned on other ops threads elsewhere.

I've also seen plenty of ops videos and such with ONLY switch lists and no carcards.  The computer really can take the place of the car cards in many instances so long as your program can "remember" where things end up.  I'd say add the JMRI module and play with it. Costs nothing but your time.

[wm3798]

You're overthinking it.
How many pieces of rolling stock are in motion on the layout at any given moment?  Probably not many compared to a big layout like my old one, or John's CSX.

The time it would take to set up the JRMI and all the attendant databases not only cuts into the train running time, but it also flies in the face of all that is holy for the ancient ways of the Rocky Mountain narrow gauge. 

What you need is a green eyeshade, a sharp pencil, and a stack of these:


On the day the fancy strikes you to operate a schedule, grab your clipboard, make a note of where everything is, then figure out where it is all supposed to be when you are done.

Your unit trains will be easy.  They'll pretty much always be coming from the same place, and going thru to the same place.  You can slip them up a little by having a pick up and set out cut at Rico.

If you have a couple of locals, see what kind of rolling stock is lined up, write them down, and decide where they're going and add that to the last column.

Then run the train, and scratch out the numbers as you go, and add the numbers of the cars you pick up.

Do this for a while, and that will give you a feeling for how much data you need to automate, and how you can format your car cards to work best for your particular layout.  But really, for the style of operations you're pursuing, it all begins and ends with the switch list, whether it's generated by a computer or a little imagination and a pencil.



My printable form is attached.  Feel free to adapt to the RGS, or to hunt down an authentic form of your own.

[wm3798]

Further, when you're "lone wolfing" it, if you have your switch lists written for say, two locals, one from each direction, you can choose which one to run first, maybe it's clogging up a yard, or has "priority" cars that need to get going, and get it ready to pull out of the terminal.

Then, to make things fun, let one of the "thru" trains loose in the opposite direction, maybe at a snail's pace so there's some linger time between its laps.  Now you have opposing traffic to your local, so you have to pick your way along the railroad writing train orders in your head as you keep an eye out for the circling schedule of train(s).  Perhaps at a particular spot in the operation, the local pauses, the Clockwise Express gets pulled off into staging and replaced with the CounterClockwise Limited, and then you go back to work on the local, this time with an eye on trains approaching from the rear.

Once you reach the final terminus of the first local, you can play engine hostler, tie up the power from the first, and bring out some horses for the local headed back down the hill, and do it all over again.

When you have company, you can run the two locals at the same time, or have the guest run the thru train while you get out of its way periodically, or vice versa.  A lot of company, and everyone gets a train, and the dispatcher has fun confounding everyone with the short siding at Lizard Head.

Like so much of model railroading, planning is important, so I won't discount that.  But as you've demonstrated with your build, the power comes from working the plan, recognizing that the first draft is never perfect, and that it's in the doing that fun evolves.  (The plan should evolve to enhance the fun, rather than planning something to death and hoping that there is a fun result).

Anyway, I'm going to go tear down my loopty layout and build a switching shelf now.  I miss this part of the hobby more than I thought!

Lee

[LIRR]

I agree with wm....when I saw the track plan I thought switch lists were the way to start....keep it simple and expand as you go...

[Dave V]

Figgerin' out where they are is the easy part.

Figgerin' out where they need to go is the hard part.

I actually printed up some very sweet paper switch lists that look "official."

So, I'm wondering if I should start even simpler per @wm3798 and just do a thing like "I need to get these empties at Ridgway to the mill at Rico and pick up the loads at the mill and take 'em to Ridgway."  That should help me figure out what track arrangement challenges I have.  FWIW, wherever possible, I followed the actual RGS track maps, so if it's a problem for me, it was a problem for them!

Then maybe I run to Rico with another load of empties, only this time I need to drop a reefer at Placerville along the way.  On the way back to Ridgway there's a load at the Alta Mine that has to go back to Ridgway.

No paperwork at that point...at least until I start figuring out the flow.

Would that work?

[Philip H]

So, I'm wondering if I should start even simpler per @wm3798 and just do a thing like "I need to get these empties at Ridgway to the mill at Rico and pick up the loads at the mill and take 'em to Ridgway."  That should help me figure out what track arrangement challenges I have.  FWIW, wherever possible, I followed the actual RGS track maps, so if it's a problem for me, it was a problem for them!

Then maybe I run to Rico with another load of empties, only this time I need to drop a reefer at Placerville along the way.  On the way back to Ridgway there's a load at the Alta Mine that has to go back to Ridgway.

Document it as you do it on a couple of forms . . . then you have the start of your traffic routing.  Do it a couple more times . . . and you have your materials to set up your switch lists.  Heck with the small amount of rolling stock you have doing this 5 or 6 times probably gives you enough switch lists for regular ops sessions as the traffic general only moves so many times.

[Dave V]

Forgot to mention a big one...  Stock movements.  I model September when the RGS was as busy as it ever gets during the year bringing beef and woolies down from the high country before the snow flies in earnest.  We had a whole discussion in an RGS interest group on exactly how this went down, but we agreed from a model railroad operations perspective we get 90% of the way there operating them as unit trains.  Livestock in cattle cars have a running clock, so the best we could figure is the train shows up, loads out, and gets out of Dodge as fast as it can.

There were major livestock loading facilities all along the RGS, the biggest ones being at Placerville, Lizard Head, and Rico.  For simplicity I only modeled the one at Rico.  So you'd want to get 'em over the line ASAP as a priority when loaded.  You can get them all the way through to Montrose and off the RGS if you're working quickly...delays en route suggest you need to get 'em out and water them at Ridgway (I have a tiny pen representing that facility on the D&RGW interchange track).  Either way, once loaded, the stock unit trains are through trains with priority even over the Goose.  They stop only for water and the brake test atop Lizard Head.

[Philip H]

So those become priority Extra movements. Just make up the switch list as more of a car consist and have one of  the boys run it to make your work switching the local all the more interesting.   

[Dave V]

Originally when I built this and didn't have room for the wye at Rico I thought "no biggie, I'll just run across to the turntable at Ridgway to turn the engine."  Ya...that's an a$$-pain.

[Ed Kapuscinski]

I like where this is headed.

I think for you switch lists are the way to go.

And I think the easiest way for you to generate them is.

Oh damn, actually. I think I might've just come up with my newest development project. I kinda wanted something new to chew on so I can learn some new technologies.

I feel like the world could definitely use a simple tool that took something like an excel sheet that created your switchlist for you. Nothing as involved as JMRI ops or anything like that, but something that took in a standardized excel sheet (car  + destination) applied some randomness to it (how likely is it that this move happens) and then gives you an output that you can use.