Part 5
In my last blog posting, I managed to get the box car traffic between Cassette and Bakery working the way I wanted it with a mixture of box cars and loads being dropped and picked up at Bakery. I had limited the number of box cars to five which matched the number of box car spots at Bakery.
Now I want to add more boxcars and restore the other traffic (covered hoppers and tank cars) to see how the mix of cars is handled. I start by adding the three more box cars (RBOX) and spotting the hoppers and tank cars at Cassette.
I build the Bakery Turn job and preview the manifest.
This looks pretty good but I want to also build a schedule for the tank cars since they are most likely carrying different types of sweeteners – corn syrup in different grades, maltose, dextrose, fructose, etc.
So, I reset the build and create the tank car schedule and add the new load types to the Tank Food cars.
Then, I add a schedule for the tank cars to the Bakery.
I will leave the schedule mode at ‘Sequential’ for now to see what happens. I need to load up the tank cars in Cassette next.
I’m going to not set the destination track at Bakery to see what JMRI does.
Finally, I will set the load on some of the tank cars in Cassette.
I build and preview the Bakery Turn job:
It looks like setting the schedule mode to ‘Sequential’ has caused only one tank car to be delivered. Since Bakery has four tank car slots, this is not really what I want. I reset the train build and set the schedule mode to ‘Match’.
That looks better.
So far, every car is fully loaded or unloaded at Bakery within a single turn. That is, a loaded car is unloaded by the time the next train arrives. What if I want some loads to take a little longer?
According to the JMRI operations help file, this is what the ‘Wait’ column in the schedule is for. The wait number is the number of trains before the car is available. I will test this by setting the wait value on the tank cars to two.
Building a number of Bakery Turn jobs show that the tank cars are only being moved from the Bakery on every second train.
I’m going to add a schedule for the grain hopper as well. I add the loads ‘Wheat’ and ‘MT’ to the grain hopper car type and then create a simple schedule.
I also make the corresponding change to the Cassette schedule.
At this point, I would probably give serious consideration to re-casting the Cassette spur as three different spurs (Cassette-HO, Cassette-TM, Cassette-XM) so that I could manage the schedules at a finer grain. For now, the single spur is enough.
To test everything so far, I reset all my cars as follows:
The following table shows the traffic generated between Cassette and Bakery over a number of Bakery Turn jobs.
| Bakery Drop Off | Bakery Pick Up |
Turn | HO | TM | XM | HO | TM | XM |
1 | Wheat | | Pie Filling, Shortening, Yeast, MT | | | |
2 | | Corn Syrup 100, Dextrose, Fructose | MT | MT | | MT, MT, MT, Baked Goods |
3 | Wheat | | Milk Powder, Pie Filling, Sugar, MT | | | Baked Goods |
4 | | | MT | | | MT, MT, MT, Baked Goods |
5 | Wheat | | Shortening, Sugar, Sugar, MT | | MT, MT, MT | Baked Goods |
6 | | Corn Syrup 100, Corn Syrup 200, Corn Syrup 100 | MT | MT | | MT, MT, MT, Baked Goods |
7 | Wheat | | Milk Powder, Sugar, Shortening, MT | | | Baked Goods |
8 | | | MT | MT | | MT, MT, MT, Baked Goods |
9 | Wheat | | Shortening, Sugar, Sugar, MT | | MT, MT, MT | Baked Goods |
10 | | Corn Syrup 100, Corn Syrup 200, Dextrose | MT | MT | | MT, MT, MT, Baked Goods |
This looks like a pretty good mixture to me. I could change the covered hopper load to more types of grain products: Durham, Semolina, Soft, Hard, etc. and add wait times to the Cassette spur schedule to mix up the traffic even more.
This is the last blog posting I plan on doing for this worked example. I have come a long way since loading JMRI onto my computer and wondering if it was really what I wanted to use instead of car cards.
For me, the answer has been a resounding ‘Yes’! JMRI has presented me with the tools I need to use for my switching operations and there is still much more to explore – yards, blocking, aggressive builds – the list continues to grow.
Before I conclude, I’d like to thank all the developers of JMRI – especially Dan Boudreau – for creating such a good, free program and answering my beginner questions in the JMRI forum. I’d also like to thank Lance Mindheim for advocating that complex operations do not require a lot of industries or track. Consider that, by move 9 above, I will have had to deal with nine cars and probably twice as many pull-push operations at the Bakery. At switching speeds, that would easily take an hour of time to complete.
Finally, I would like to thank the members of the MRH forum (and MRH for hosting this blog) who have offered comments and suggestions. Keep ‘em coming guys!
I also have a question for the forum. Does anyone see any value in me bundling all these postings up into a PDF or other format document? I have all the original text and images saved, so it would not be that difficult.
-david-
