Not for a long time

I used them about 20 years ago for a modular layout, but not since.  I know there is one fellow who swears by them and uses them today.

Who?

Can't see any reason to mess up cars with tacks

when we have pencils and papers to write out switch lists for small layouts and modern computer programs to keep track of cars on large layouts?  If John Allen was alive now he'd not be doing the same old  stuff he did in the 1950's. .DaveBranum

Thanks to respondents

Contact Bruce

Tab on car

I’ve used a similar system since 1980.  I use ¾” “fender washers” for the tabs that sit on top of the cars.  The tab is two-sided – shipper and consignee. Round, color-coded Avery labels are printed with destinations and stuck on the washers. A short piece of brass rod or piano wire sticks out of the car roof or other area to hold the tab in place.

After a car is delivered to the correct location, the tab is turned between sessions and the car gets routed to the next location.  To hold the car for extra time, a blank “work” tab is placed on top of the location tab.

The system is simple, flexible, easy to learn and use. No boxes or sorting shelves cluttering up the fascia. No cards laying around during operations. Waybills don’t mysteriously disappear in operator’s pockets and go home with them. The tabs can be removed for photos, if desired.

It’s almost fool-proof – if a car is spotted incorrectly, it is simply moved to the right place in the next session. Getting ready for the next session is simple – just turn the tabs and remove “work tabs”.  Even with 300 cars on the layout, it takes only 30 minutes to get ready for the next session.  I hosted four three-hour sessions over two days during a convention last year and was able to get ready for each session very quickly.     

Having the “waybill” on the car lets the operator concentrate on switching moves rather than sorting through card boxes and card decks and trying to figure out what goes where.  Also, since the car itself is the “car card”, there is no need to have unique car numbers. I tried both car cards/waybills and switch lists at first but quickly became tired to trying to renumber cars.    

Good for you, George!

George's odyssey

Tabs on Cars, the photo

Here are some sample tabs.

 Each town or switching area has a color code, in this case yellow for "Windsor".  The tabs also have a two letter abbreviation for the town ("WN") and a three letter acronym for the specific spot ("PLT" for pellet track).

Yard work is easy - collect tabs of the right color(s) for each train.

I have a very detailed description of how I used tabs on my old Colorado and Southern web page:

http://users.frii.com/gbooth/Trains/ColoradoAndSouthern/Operations/TabSystem/tabOnCar.htm

Thanks for the interest.

I remember back in the

I remember back in the 70s Model Railroader ran their April fools joke. The picture was car tacks on prototype equipment. Think they had a bit of trouble with the autoracks. Ended up with a few cars with holes in the roof.....LOL

I'm wondering if this system

I'm wondering if this system can be achieved with using fridge magnet type material and a washer or such glued on the inside of the car or under the roofwalk, so you've got no holes or such to worry about?

Roof Tags

The Castle Rock And Pacific (CRAP) uses paper tags like you describe for blocking trains in the yards. Before the trains leave the yard, the tags are collected and put into plastic bins on the fascia above the yard.

The system works incredibly well, as the Yard Master just places the tags on the cars, and the Yard Engineer simply needs to collect all the cars with the same color/number onto a track. Once you have all the tagged cars together, you add them to the rest of the train in numeric order.

Thanks to all

I appreciate all the responses. And George, your 11-page exposition of how your fender washer tab system works was very helpful.

I checked out the possibility of using frig magnets. They are not strong enough for reliable holding thru the thickness of the car roof. Looking into neodymium magnets now. Very powerful and very cheap now.

Please keep comments comin', and thanks again to all.

Outdated?

I don't believe in so called "outdated ideas". If it worked then, it will work now and whatever works for someone works. Not everybody in the hobby wants to overcomplicate things with writing out switch list or juggling packs of card cards and waybills. Nor do they want to subject themselves to the pressure of running TT &TO scenarios. Some folks call that fun and if they enjoy it more power to them but some of us just want a simple  way to route cars and " waytacks" do that well. I'd love to see an article done on it instead of the overly complicated operation scenarios for basement sized behemoths with multiple operating crews. Every time I ever look for anything on operations, I always come up with articles and videos on how to operate the monster sized layouts and very little on smaller one man operations.  Which is not to say you can't use " waytacks" on larger layouts but they do seem to lend themselves well to smaller layouts.

Michael

"and very little on smaller one man operations"

Probably because small one man layouts are simple to operate with switch lists or just a mental picture of where everything is going?  Switch lists are fun for me because when I was a kid I watched the SP crews switching cars with them in the yards, I never saw them haul huge colored tacks up on the roofs :> )  If the layout is larger and needs some kind of system to keep things in order and flowing smoothly there's lots of information out there on line or in magazines over the years  so I don't think it's a lack of articles it's more a lack of finding them..DaveB

Magnets

I would think magnets under the car roof might make the car top heavy and cause operating problems.  But with small powerful modern magnets, it might work fine. 

Prototype Waytacks

I think this was from Bruce Chubb's original book on operating:

Giant tack!

Love the pic of the two ladies and the giant waytack!    Did Bruce Chubb borrow it from some promotional hobby film?

Proto Elite

I like to think of the "way tacks" or my tabs as equivalent to the waybills that used to be stapled to the tack boards of railroad cars.  They are just a little easier to read in HO scale.

I must have forgotten - tell me again which prototypes used the car cards and waybills so popular with "prototype operators".  I imagine the conductors had plenty of time with a 1:1 fast clock to sort the card decks for the train but who ran around to get the cards from Setout, Work and Pickup boxes in each town?   

Oops, is my tongue in my cheek again?

Magnetic waytacks

First experiments with neodymium magnet look promising, at least for house cars. Can someone more knowlegeable tell me how to post photos? Could not find any instructions on the Forum. Thanks.

Posting Images

Click the Help menu at the top of the screen, go to Questions and Answers, then Website Help then How Do I Post an Image.

CC&WB vs Waybills

Remember that the combination of a car card and waybill represents the prototype piece of paper called a waybill.  If you put your CC&WB on a photocopier and "compress" them into one sheet of paper you end up with defacto waybills. 

So to answer your question 100% of railroad for the last 100-130 years used waybills.

It was very common for industries and agents to leave waybills for cars to be picked up or crews leave waybills for the agent in "bill boxes" at the depots and industries.

So once again on virtually every railroad for a 75 years left waybills and switching instructions for crews in boxes at the industries.

If you are still hung up on the word "card" then the answer is most class 1's for about 10-15 year span used inventory systems that were driven by "IBM" cards.  So every time a car entered a yard or a reporting area, the agents would have a "car card" punched for the car and they would track the position of the car in the yard using those car car IBM cards, exactly as modelers use CC&WB.  I watched my clerks at Durand, KS do it day in and day out.

So the question of whether real railroads actually used "car cards", the answer is YES!

Hope this jogs your memory.

Stick to the point, please

By all accounts

John Allen was very much a proponent of realistic operation. He used various colored tacks and washers on the G&D. It's not like car cards and waybills were not around back then either. They were. The prototype doesn't have giant hands coming in from above to throw turnouts or a giant bamboo skewer being used to uncouple cars so I find the argument against waytacks that the prototype doesn't have giant tacks on top of the cars quite silly.

Michael