----- Original Message -----
From: Tim O'Connor
To: STMFC@...
Sent: Monday, June 08, 2009 9:41 PM
Subject: [STMFC] Re: Rolling stock as scenery





Bob

Methods like that work ok on private layouts where one person
usually has strict control over the layout and its operations.
All car card methods tend to fall apart on large club layouts
if the "velocity" of cars falls below a critical threshold as
I described yesterday. It's extremely common on the operation
I'm familiar with for cars never to actually be delivered to
a customer, although they often do arrive in the final yard
(from which they would go into a local or switch job for final
delivery). Because there are real breaks in the operation and
personnel (many weeks or months of time, and two or three or
more people involved) the flow is lost unless there is some
incredibly complicated way of handling car cards that "stores"
the sense of sequence of operations for each individual car.

In other words if a car's waybill from origin to destination
assumes that steps 1,2,3,...,10 are all executed without error
then over the 2 or 3 months these steps actually take, there
is the random factor of mishandling and quite often, the car
never gets to step 10... or maybe just repeats a step. I've
seen plenty of both.

Tim O'Connor

>I recall the article by Douglas Smith on card operation [The latest word
>from Doug on card operations, Model Railroader, December 1961
><http://index.mrmag.com/tm.exe?opt=I&MAG=MR&MO=12&YR=1961&output=3&sort=3>
>page 52] that the sequence was to leave a car stay in place at the
>customer's spot for at least one sequence of the local freight passing
>through a town with the sequence being drop-off, load or unload, and
>then pick-up. No doubt methods to operate layouts are more complex
>today, but this simple step to allow time for a car to be either loaded
>or unloaded should be incorporated into any operating scheme.
>
>Bob Witt
>Indianapolis, Indiana






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