The Road of Service reached a milestone of sorts today. The first Spur 4 General Tire job ran, with paperwork supporting car forwarding. Here's a shot of the MTYs being placed after pulling the loads from the outbound dock. You can see the paperwork in the lower LH corner of the photo.
The car forwarding paperwork is generated with a spreadsheet. It worked well for the General job and I'm tweaking things as I go. For a small layout such as mine I think it will work just fine. I've operated on layouts using Ship It!, JMRI, Car Cards and Car Tabs. I prefer using switch lists and conductor's wheel reports but didn't really want to deal with a canned program. I also wanted to include the use of simplified car service rules for routing LDs and MTYs out of Brittain to add a little bit of thought and chance to the yard work but still minimize the "clerking" aspect yard work so I don't drive guest operators away. Here's a shot of Brittain with the next three Spur 4 jobs ready to go and cars classified by outbound road freight, Mogadore Valley, B&O transfer, Erie transfer and home road storage.
When I did my car inventory spreadsheet I found I had 200 cars ready to go, meaning lowered with body mounted couplers and weathered. I was pumped, until I realized it was the result of 20 years of work. 10 cars a year. Not so hot. I will say that after drilling cars in the yard and running the General job I learned a LOT about the differences between the theory of lowering cars, trucks, wheel sets and couplers and the reality of same. I think I'll run the other Spur 4 jobs to gather more data and then perhaps start a new thread on the subject to get some thoughts from the TRW crew. I will say that I'm beginning to question some of what may be widely held beliefs. Some perspective from others would be valuable.
Steve
