Operations on the B&M Eastern Route

[jbvb]

14-Apr-2019: RailRun 2019 Action Report: Six operators new to the Eastern Route, one experienced Helper and me. Ran the whole 12 hours, missed a couple of commuter trains in the afternoon rush. No photos as I was too busy.

1. Re-doing most of the weighbills with 11 point/bold blocking codes was helpful. I was asked about the few remaining typed weighbills several times, also about a couple of blocking codes I'd mis-typed.
2. Erich brought a couple of MRC wired throttles, so I didn't have to schedule throttles.
3. Nobody except Erich was experienced at WiThrottle or EngineDriver, so the MRC 1530 WiFi interface went largely unused.
4. Rewiring Bexley Yard was definitely worth it: no blown fuses and few FEEPs I had to intervene in. One did take me a minute: A short when the Yard 1 turnout was reversed. Turned out to be a loco across the block gap up the ladder on Yard 4. Painting ties for 'fouling points' will probably help,
5. The Train Cards were helpful for the switchers and local freights, so I'll complete them. But one visitor got bollixed up westbound in Newburyport and ran quite late. However, he sorted out his Bexley setout correctly so only complicated things there for 15 scale minutes.
6. I/R detectors, possibly with some automation, are needed now that I'm splitting one of the long 'Saugus' staging tracks.

I managed Draw Operator (staging) fairly well among my other duties. I did the two 'move a train up' operations before they were needed. I'm still not completely happy about how visitors interact with my layout, though - it's fairly complicated compared to most other RRs I've operated. Having more op sessions this year will help me, personally, as local operators will get more familiar with the Eastern. Materials improvements on the Punch List will help too. And maybe my 10-y-o will get to the point where he can be a 'pilot' too. I'll find out next year, fate willing.

11-May-2019: Another op session this morning: Four experienced operators, one 2nd timer and one newcomer. I was crew caller, Draw (staging) operator and Bexley Train Director (a B&M title for towermen managing CTC segments). A somewhat late start led us to stop the clock at 10:30 AM, so the last two morning passenger trains didn't run. But we did run the whole weekday rush hour.

1. Running the Bexley Goat is a complicated job, even with the blocking codes on the re-issued weighbills. Quite a few misroutes today.

2. The Portsmouth Freight ran near its 12-car limit, but Erich had plenty of time to do Newburyport once he oriented himself.

3. Bexley managed to handle a passenger train turning in the yard while both the Goat and the Camel (Boston - Bexley hauler turn) were in the yard, but the session would have been more balanced if I'd enforced the 7:45 quit time for the 1st Bexley Goat and 8:15 start time for the 2nd. I'll think about modest shifts of freight activity away from the morning rush.

4. 4:1 fast clock is about right for the number of freight cars and moves in a typical session, but the passenger timings are pretty slow. Maybe I'll try trimming the freight car population by 10% next time and see if I can speed up the clock. Experience to date suggests that increasing load/unload times alone won't simplify much.

5. Recent improvements to operating documents have helped, but I missed opportunities to have the two least experienced operators read them before their jobs started.

6. Three operators used phone/WiFi throttle apps for the whole session without any trouble from the MRC 1530. I gave wired throttles to others running in the north half of the room, and wireless to Bexley and West Lynn engineers. There was some congestion around the two Bexley plug-in locations, none elsewhere.

7. None of my visitors had the combination of cab ride/rule book experience and comfort with other aspects of their job to put any energy into prototypical whistle & bell use. The most experienced were paying attention to the signals. And this crew is getting the hang of keeping the passenger trains more or less on time.

I'll be trying another in June.

Pete commented:

Excellent summary, James! Sounds like an enjoyable session, with some lessons learned and catalogued (and to be applied out here when the time comes), and that's a Good Thing!
Keep Training, and please keep us posted.

Michael_Hohn asked:

Interesting observations.
I think it's hard to build a timetable that works well for both freight and passenger trains. Do you run all your trains from a timetable?

Thanks, Pete. Mike, I have 'on duty' times for my freights and I've done some planning trying to avoid congestion at yards & sidings. But the freights don't appear on the passenger timetable - only First Class trains are scheduled all the way.

BurleyJim asked:

As 'crew caller' are you taking on the role of Dispatcher? Have you set up any O.S. check-in locations? Sounds like you are having a good time with it.

I'm the closest thing to a Dispatcher the Eastern has. Freights get the moral equivalent of a Clearance Form A at origin but not Train Orders. Freights run per the train card and have to clear First Class. On a railroad where you can see three of the four stations from any point, this has sufficed. I'd try Train Orders and a Dispatcher's Phone if my crew wanted, but to date few, if any are interested in following those aspects of the prototype. Maybe if I only tried to cover 6 timetable hours in each session?

9-Sep-2021: I was rebuilding my threads on the then-new RR-Line software.

As it turned out, I had no operating sessions in Fall 2019, and then came the virus. So after more than two years I'm getting organized for two sessions as part of the NER Mill City 21 convention Columbus Day weekend. I may try to get an experienced crew for a warmup beforehand, but I have lots of other work to fill the next four weeks.

11-Oct-2021: Action Report, Two Mill City 21 op sessions: Everyone survived being masked throughout, weather allowed open window ventilation.

#15 had 6 operators with me as Crew Caller, Towerman etc. Most had considerable experience, a couple much less. Nobody had tried to run freight mixed with 14 passenger trains in 3 real hours. Bexley Yard was relatively hard work, particularly when something distracted me and I didn't get the 2nd Lynn Goat started on time. A few misroutes because it wasn't obvious what to do when a car arrives at its 'blocking code' (look at Destination and Consignee). I told the operators not to worry about the Humpyard levers breaking but that might have led to less care about the machinery behind them - a couple of connections pulled apart at inconvenient times. I stopped the clock for a while. One operator arrived late, and some had to leave early, so we only ran 0001 to 1030.

My punch list includes reprinting weighbills whose laser printing isn't wearing well and rebalancing off-line destinations (way too many cars via South Boston). I was up late fixing the turnouts and mixing re-staging with running the freights that hadn't been completed.

#16 today only had 4 operators originally, one told me he wouldn't make it, another didn't. So I managed the layout while the other two ran most of the morning freight trains. I have one more to run before I re-stage.

I believe everyone had fun, don't know if I'll get more feedback. Once I'm ready again, I'll try to get another one in before Thanksgiving.

desertdrover (Louis) commented:

Sounds like it was a lot of fun, operations sounds like a real railroad operations with, all the going on's and maintenance issues.

21-Oct-20121: Last weekend I ran the trains that didn't run during the 2nd operating session, then re-staged. But I'm still thinking about the congestion problems that cropped up: Too many cars headed for Newburyport, Bexley customer spurs and South Boston. I think all of them follow from three things:

First, across several op sessions, I didn't cut off switching jobs at the scheduled quitting time. That resulted in cars arriving after the switcher went off duty getting classified and sent out, rather than sitting there till the next train to their destination (either next op session or the one after that).

Second, 95 cars on the layout might be a few too many. There are currently 75 spots . There's no shortage of room in the yards but balancing staging requires careful card turning.

Third, I need to re-balance some destinations. I can fix some of this by selecting which cars come off the layout, some more by swapping cars on the layout for cars presently in storage boxes. Going through all 9 weighbill spreadsheets is more work, but there are some with flaking ink due to insufficient fuser heat and one card that's just wrong.

I'll see if I can get an op session together for the first weekend in November. It should be more relaxing for me with most or all the operators knowing the layout.

Pete replied:

Sounds like Progress nonetheless, James! Keep going! Please keep us up to date on how things are running.... Some of Us are on the rotation here for 17 November, which will be the first "real" Op Session in two years, and the second one overall. The Superintendent has a lot to learn, and the railroad needs some additional TLC before things will run smoothly. Have found a few unwanted and unnecessary motive power issues recently too....
OTOH, my twelve year-old grandson, operating with his 14 y.o. brother, found the source of an "occasional," and unpredictable derailment inside the bottom back curve of one of the helices back in August, and that issue was remedied shortly after they left. Life is Good!

7-Nov-2021: Op Session #17 is history. Five operators who'd operated here before, one was elsewhere on business; We didn't run much of the passenger schedule. And there was a lot of conversation before we actually started the clock, so we only ran noon - 7:30 PM. Some operators were a bit rusty after a year or more away from car cards and timetables but everyone had a good time. No photos because things kept coming up. Nothing too serious: a couple of turnouts acting up, a couple of DCC firmware crashes, car routing questions etc.

One thing I think I have to address: of about 45 cars moved, I found at least 15 mis-routes as I started to clean up. My layout is just an oval, but there are five different ways freight cars can enter and leave the 'stage', each representing a different routing. I suppose I could just let it be; eventually it ought to straighten itself out. But with 1/3 mis-routes and only a few sessions a year, that will take a very long time. Plus, all my real RR paychecks came from service planning, and my 1954 Terminal Division Make-Up of Trains book makes it clear that good service was a goal then.

I put considerable time into my car cards: I researched plausible values for Contents, Shipper, Origin, Consignee, Destination, and Route. There are also alphabetic codes for the on-line destination and area within the destination. But I am beginning to wonder if I am assuming too much about people's vision. The spreadsheets I started from were developed for a Boston-area club, and had color codes in addition to the text fields. They got in the way when I only had a B&W printer, but now I could try restoring them. I suppose if "Put each color together, Green goes in the Casco, Orange in the Narragansett..." gets the results I want, I can accept that...

Between the holidays and a bunch of model events, the next op session probably will be after January, so I have time to think before I touch up and re-print.

Pete commented:

I think the important part here is the "Good time was had by All" aspect of things. Most of the stuff I see and hear about resuming Op Sessions is related to the joy of gathering again and the "Let's see if it still runs and we know where to find stuff" aspects of getting going again. We're going through that process around here, and are enjoying the camaraderie, perhaps more so than the actual operating!
Your color codes issues might be able to be resolved with a pack of Sharpie colored markers from a stationer, which would eliminate the need to reprint everything. A stripe across the top of the card should do it....
In any case, I'm glad that #17 worked... I'm up for #2 here (after twenty-one months) next week, so the clock is running!

Michael_Hohn commented:

When I see you have a new post on this thread, I often wait until I can relax and read it through at leisure, taking time to cogitate upon what you've written.
As Pete said, having fun is the main idea. But beyond that simple goal, those of us who put together op sessions like to see them work out.
So, what was the nature of the misdirections? From what you've written, it sounds like people didn't understand how to route cars so that they reached their destination.
I've seen color-coded hints on car cards as to routes cars should take, but I've never worked on a layout that did that. I'm sure it's easy but hard to fully grasp in theory (at least for me.) Maybe it takes a little experience to work smoothly. I like Pete's suggestion; it was certainly the way it was done before we all had color printers.
Maybe you should do some switching runs to put cars in the right places. It might help you figure out the problems

9-Nov-2021: Pete, I printed my spreadsheet weighbills on green cardstock, so I need to experiment with markers, highlighters etc. I know if I keep the current bills, I can't code Maine Central/Rigby Yard in Portland as the mnemonic "Pine Tree Green". I'm not so sure about "Warm Orange" for New Haven/South Boston routes either. Another thing is some operators are colorblind - one Mill City guest reminded me of this; he didn't find my signals very useful.

Mike, when an op session doesn't run till noon/midnight, I switch the remainder of the day in the process of re-staging. I mentioned wondering how many of my operators can read all the text on my bills. But underlying that is wondering how many of them appreciate or even care about the routes, cargoes and priorities. Employees from the 50s and 60s were often pretty familiar with what they were moving and for whom; Trainmasters and Freight Agents were both involved with getting and keeping business. I've studied it, and I enjoy working with what I printed. But I have a feeling I should keep my layout open to people closer to the "run some trains, switch some cars" end of the spectrum. If I do add colors, there won't be more than 5, and they'll only appear on weighbill faces that move cars 'offstage'.

Michael_Hohn replied:

One simple "car forwarding" scheme I've seen is to give engineers instructions like "drop two boxcars at location X, pick up 2 boxcars." etc.
Yes, familiarity with routes and customers helps on model railroads just as it does on the real ones

Pete replied:

The green card issue will indeed monkey with my Sharpie stripes process, but the colors could be applied to dot stickers or a cut piece of paper taped to the car cards. As to the signals and the colorblind, again, I'm thinking I'll need some fascia-mounted position light signal repeaters.... YMMV.

Please keep the comments coming! We all learn from this stuff!

WNBranch (Dave Husman) commented:

Regarding "TT&TO" operation on double track, in most cases they operated two main tracks as "double track" (an actual operating method in the rules) where the tracks were signaled for operation in one direction on each track, the signal indications superseded the superiority of trains an the signals authorized the trains to move. The only time you needed train orders were if you operated against the flow of traffic on the "wrong" main. A lot of places had center sidings and either a message (not a train order) or a train order was used to tell the trains to take siding and let another train pass.
Do you have a picture of your car cards? That might help in understanding why the routing was an issue.
Sometime people just don't pay attention, sometimes they get lost, sometimes the documentation isn't as obvious as we would like to think it is.
In the three major terminals I put a little green tab in the pockets of the cars I want spotted that session. The one exception is that at the steel mills, the switcher has a message to spot so many empty gons to each loading track in the various mills. I leave it up to the switcher to choose the empty gons based on what's available. In one of my last sessions, the switcher didn't spot any empties to any mills because none of the empties had a green spot tag in them.
They got the part about the spot tag but missed the empties even though they had written instructions telling them how many empties to spot in each track.
Sigh.

14-Nov-2021: Mike, an N scale layout in my area uses printed train work lists. The owner's directions are much as you describe: "At Mattawamkeag, pick up all covered hoppers, leave all wood chip cars" etc. That's fun, but I wanted to tell a more detailed story on my own layout.

Pete, you could do your 'position light repeaters' with 4 LEDs in a pseudo-semaphore arrangement (like a PRR position-light dwarf).

Dave, the B&M made a lot of use of 'Proceed on signal indication with Form A' (Clearance Card) on direction-of-travel double track. I started out with Micro-Mark weighbills, typed. But I wanted to be able to change things without re-typing all four faces. And I wanted more information, like the blocking, than I could fit with the typewriter. My cards are 2" wide by 3 1/8 high, roughly the same as MicroMark's. I am thinking about a spot of paint next to 'Waybill' to avoid re-printing.

[jbvb]

WNBranch (Dave Husman) replied:

You said you wanted to include "blocking". In the waybill example shown above, what tells me what the blocking is? For example if I was on a train with that car and waybill, on move one I would set the car out at West Lynn. On move two I would take it to Bexley and that's all the further I would take it on that move.
I also use a color code with the blocking instructions. I also had used colored paper for empty car waybills (prototypical) but instead went to standard manila paper so I could use colored stripes on the waybill. I have a poster on the wall with the blocking/color code and the text block names. Each yardmaster has a train building sheet that shows how trains are supposed to be blocked. If you are interested I can post pictures of them.
For my "yard blocks" I have different block names in the same color code. For example, the major terminal at the south end is Wilmington. The color for Wilmington is yellow. I have several switching areas in Wilmington: Maryland Ave. (MD), Dela. River Extension (DRE), Harlan & Hollingsworth Shipyards (H&H), the car float to Carney's Point, NJ (Float), 6th Ave (6th) and the PRR interchange (PRR). For all of those the stripe will be yellow, but the block code will be "Wilm" plus the area code, as in Wilm-MD, Wilm-DRE, Wilm-H&H, Wilm-Float, Wilm-6th and Wilm-PRR. The crews everywhere but Wilmington know to send those cars to Wilmington because of the yellow stripe and "Wilm-..." prefix. Once they are at Wilmington the Wilmington yard crews can then use the detail block (-DRE, -H&,H, -MD, etc) to figure out which area in the terminal they will be going. Has been pretty successful so far.

15-Nov-2021: Yes, the 'W' at the top left duplicates the 'To:' line, the word 'West Lynn' or 'Bexley' is the yard that handles the 'To:' destination. I added the W and N forthose having difficulty with small print, I am thinking about colors because the larger letters weren't helping.

I am trying to squeeze a lot into a limited quantity of staging, so I do all the bill flipping between sessions. I'll also try annotating a picture of a bill and printing out copies 4x life size.

Michael_Hohn replied:

Yes, I find that simple op scene a little too simple for my taste. Really, it's only appropriate for very inexperienced operators or a very low-key session.
I prefer the sense of getting work done.
Maybe cut-down colored price stickers would work rather than colored markers. Or has that been suggested? I suppose they might peel off but that's not been my experience. They can be the devil to remove. On the other hand, that would be a lot of little stickers to put on waybills

WNBranch (Dave Husman) replied:

You have a LOT going on on that waybill. It could be that the answer isn't adding something but removing some things or moving the the critical things to the top and the same line.
Am I supposed to be following the letter in the box, am I supposed to be following the station on the 2nd line, am I supposed to be following the "To" line.
On move 1 they are consistent (all W Lynn), but on move two they aren't (2 are Newburyport, 1 is Bexley).
Here is an example of my car cards and waybills. They are "non-standard" because they represent a "car ticket" or memorandum waybill that was in use in my era. The blocking code and the color code are all on one line, the "Via" line. The "To" line is the final destination. I tell yardmasters and crews to block trains by the Via line. Whether they go by the color or the block code, there is only one line that they have to pay attention to if the car is not at its blocking destination:

Trolley track consumed all my time and attention for a couple of years. But I did eventually reply:

16-May-2023: I see what you're saying, Dave. But a lot of the extra information I put on my weighbills is because I'm modeling real customers and consider the routings and commodities part of the history I'm trying to re-create.

My layout is basically an oval with one classification yard. The complexity that troubles some yardmasters is that cars "leaving" the modeled portion of the layout do so in one of four different trains. Today I finished adding color codes to all the weighbills. After I finish re-staging I'll see if I can get an op session in before the attic gets hot. Even if the friends who catch the Bexley Switcher job continue to misroute cars, the colors will make it simpler for me to square everything up between sessions.

WNBranch (Dave Husman) commented:

I'm modeling real industries and considering real routings too.
Just remember that a prototype waybill will not tell anybody which train a car goes on. Not on the waybill. There is a whole 'nother level of documentation that tells the crews and yardmasters which train a car will ride on. The waybill drives that decision, but there is another decision tree that the yardmasters use. That is blocking. You either need a secret decoder ring the yardmasters and switch crews car refer to to help decide or you need to put some sort of indicator on the waybill that tells them. I was in the operating department of a real railroad for 37 years and we never looked at waybills in real time operations. What drove our operations were the documentation that came from translating the waybill info into the railroad routing and blocking plan.
I use a block name or code with a colored stripe keyed to the block, and then a diagram of which trains carry which blocks. A friend of mine puts the first and last train id on the waybill (SDX L452). The train that brings the car out of staging is the SDX and the train that spots the car at industry is the L452.
A railroad car always has 3 destinations:
- The next destination, the next place that the railroad is going to take the car or train the car is going to ride.
- The system destination, the last place the car will go on the railroad it's on.
- The final destination, the place the car is ultimately going.
The three destinations ca all be the same or they can all be different. The final destination remains the same, the system destination changes if the route has multiple railroads and the next destination changes multiple times as the car moves across the railroad. The final and system destinations are on the waybill. The problem is that the next destination, the one the yardmasters and crews really care about, is not on the waybill. Unless the crews know the next destination, they will misroute the cars. You can add next destination info to the waybill (unprototypical) or you can develop documentation that the crews can use to translate the waybill into next destination info (slow, cumbersome and prone to error). Additionally the next destination will change as the car moves across the layout. The instructions/coding has to be
flexible enough inform all the crews that might touch the car.
Either way, the challenge to the proper routing of cars is to build a system that allows the yardmasters and crews to know what the next destination is and follow the car on it's trip across the railroad.

That was the last post on RR-Line. I still need to fully integrate what Dave Husman said with my operating scheme.

[jbvb]

To bring things up to date: I had one HUB High Green operating session 3-May-2024 ( #18 ) with seven operators.

The next sessions were two 2025 HUB High Green May 3 ( #19 ) with 6 guests and May 4 ( #20 ) with 8 guests.  The punch list doesn't have many entries, but one is replacing a #8 commercial turnout I used in Bexley with handlaid: It's on cork roadbed and occasionally moves with the seasons enough to derail something or play difficult to throw.  The other is bigger: three Walthers #6 3-ways and two 1970s-vintage Shinohara-Lambert #6s in the Draw staging west throat are causing several kinds of trouble: power routing contacts on Shinohara points were flaky and the Walthers have both poor throw reliability and electrical issues.

Meanwhile the 1970s heel-thrown point turnouts in Bexley need little attention, and those I started building 20 years ago have needed none. The Draw throat will be a build-out-of-place project with the layout down for a week or more to swap the handlaid module in.  First I'll draw it to see how much space I gain by using curved turnouts.

[deemery]

Some of the comments reminded me of people who are no longer with us, or who didn't make the transition from Railroad-Line.  But reading this as a retrospective shows how the operating concept evolved and was debugged (both hardware and "software", procedures, etc.)  

dave

[jbvb]

I re-read these old threads from time to time. It's useful to remind myself of how something evolved before I return to working on it.

Some of the operators shown aren't among us anymore too. But the wheel turns...

[ACL1504]

James,

Looks like everyone was very busy and having a great time as well.

Tom