YM duties in context...

Dear Ken,

Given that that "rake same-type-of hoppers" is carrying (or specifically-called to be loaded-with-and-carry) anything upwards of 15 different and distinct grades of coal (divided by both size and chemical makeup),

yardmaster-ing and marshalling said trains could well keep the astute operator busy and amused for some time.

Coal shipments work to quite-tight time windows
(power plants and steel-mills shut down without coal/fuel, ships sail whether the hold is full or not, etc etc),

and if the Yardmaster fails to
- get the right grades marshalled to depart to the correct destinations
- within the time-windows available

then things can get quite "exciting"...

Unsure if it fits your desired era and railroad,
but anytime I'm thinking eastern coal modelling or details thereof,
Dan Borque's "Appalachian Railroad Modelling" website never fails to answers the questions...

http://appalachianrailroadmodeling.com/abcs-mine-run-operations/

http://appalachianrailroadmodeling.com/crr-operations-on-the-fremont-branch/

http://appalachianrailroadmodeling.com/nw-norton-yard-brakes-and-tight-tunnels/

One thing that does come to mind, if you're setting out to build a layout which emulates the full range of prototype job-titles/positions of a particular RR/operation/division/sub,
then you have to have "buy-in" on the part of the crew members.

Any crew member who is not willing to "buy-in" and fill the positions as the Sign-on board calls for them is a potential threat to the overall running of the session. 

By all means, if you feel the YM task is "too mindnumbing",
(and hey, for the experienced proto YM, being "mindnumbing" may well be the sign that the model-equivalent is 100% accurate to it's prototype inspiration!),

then sure, a measure of "livening things up" may or may not be beneficial in terms of "catching and keeping good crew"...

...but it comes down to priorities:
- Are you, as the layout builder and owner, creating a job/task which is not accurate to the prototype YM position?

- If NO, (the model YM is doing exactly as the proto YM does),
is it "soo boring" as to not be appealing to the "fully committed and bought-in" crew member?

- If deviating from proto YM tasks is required to keep things "fun",
how much deviation are you, as the layout builder and owner, willing to accept,

bearing in mind that "everything involved with hauling coal over the apalachians" was the stated inspiration that set you on this path in the first place?
(is making a "fun" model YM position actually going to compromise _your_ "vision" for the layout and op session/capabilities?)

Happy Modelling,
Aim to Improve,
Prof Klyzlr

There is always a balance

between following what the prototype did while still keeping it fun.  There are many aspects of what the prototype did (and/or still does) that is very boring and therefore efforts should be made to not emulate them.  There is fun following how the prototype did/does things, however, one must be very careful not to turn it into "work". 

Ken L.

A Car is a Car

Ken,

When wrestling with questions or decisions that sometimes need to be made in real life I like to try and think of another situation that might help put my decision in context. So, if you were modeling a mid-west railroad that had tons of covered hoppers that needed to be switched for various destinations, would that be any more or less "fun" than classifying all the coal loads that need to be sorted in your marshaling yard? To me it doesn't seem like it would be much different.

Sure, the covered hoppers might have a little more variety in what they look like built into them than your coal hoppers do to help keep things from being monotonous. But couldn't coal hoppers be just as varied? I mean you can have various kinds of hoppers, 2-bay, 3-bay, quads. You could make different kinds of coal loads in terms of size of coal and perhaps different grades. You could vary the look of the coal loads to reflect the kind of loader that put the coal into the hopper, for instance a single long hump of coal verses multiple humps.

Personally, I don't think I would have a problem switching your marshaling yard. The reason being simply is that a car is a car! So if I have a stack of car forwarding cards that tell me this car has to go here or there, it really doesn't matter if the car looks like another car or not. My focus isn't so much on the car itself as it is the switching problem involving that car. True, I might have to be a little more careful making sure I'm spotting the right car or cut of cars in the proper place because of their similarity, but that might actually heighten the challenge rather than diminish it. And again that would be no different than the scene involving covered hoppers I already mentioned. For what it's worth, hope that helps.

On another note, I too am modeling an Appalachian coal hauling railroad and would really be interested in taking a look at your track plan. I tried a search for it but couldn't find it, and for some reason couldn't see any of your past blog posts. So is your plan posted any where? Thanks...

Yardmaster

You aren't thinking about everything that goes on.  The empties have to come from someplace.  Where do they come from?  Is there any differenciation between empties for the mines.  If all the mines are served by your railroad then in most cases the empties will be generic, any empty, any mine.  The loads could go in multiple directions, but how many do you really have?  Do you really need to do detail blocking at the coal marshalling yard?  Or do the loads just go "mine run" to the class yard to be folded into whatever trains are going in the right direction?  Trains of loads probably go to whatever destination the empties came from.  You have to balance power, crews and cabooses for whatever brings the empties to whatever hauls away the loads.

I could see a yard engine switching the 6 inbound trains and the 6 outbound trains the yard will handle a shift.

Empties come from where they

Empties come from where they are unloaded, and no that is not meant to be a wise acre answer. In addition some cars maybe in captive service such as battleship gons that could only be unloaded at a location with a rotary dumper. Some mines will have customers that require specific types of cars etc to match their unloading facilities and others will require trainloads of specific coal. A reprint of a marketing book on how the Virginian Moves coal is very interesting read and very informative for its limited number of pages.

For a similar operation

For a similar operation involving iron ore, I refer you to an earlier post I made here

https://forum.mrhmag.com/post/ore-operations-on-the-missabe-duluth-12192395

The Missabe had no yard masters except in its two largest ore sorting yards of Proctor and Two Harbors, where the trains were made up for loading into Great Lakes ore boats.  At the heights of complexity in the 1950s, there were literally hundreds of ore grades, and an army of clerks was used at the yard and dock to “get it right” to match a steel plant’s grade requirements.

In my model version, the mines ship 3 possible grades of ore, which have slightly different colors of loads for easy visual queue.  Each mine always ships the same color or grade.

We do not have a yardmaster at Proctor.  The incoming trains bring a mix of grades from the North End yards and mines, although there will usually be several cars in a row of the same grade.

The Yard switch job must sort the cars onto the Class Yard tracks, where each track has cars of a single grade.  The Hill Ore job brings single tracks of cars to the dock for boat loading.

As I said above, in real life, a lot of effort was devoted to keeping track of the ore grades and matching them to boat arrivals/steel mill orders.  On the model, the yard job needs only to sort by 3 colors; straightforward and no paperwork.

If you could create coal loads of varying and distinct colors, you might find a workable solution.  There is nothing special about the number of colors I chose.  It was just a practical solution given the number of tracks in Proctor.

What Milt said...

My whole Layout is one commodity. Iron ore. But for now, there are five grades of ore. I use colored map pins to denote the various grades. You could do the same with coal, as it can be classified into lump, breaker, shake, fine, or destination..lake or river or ocean. 

That would be a fun job, as any yard is a fun job.

Thomas Gasior

Flows

 Yes empties are made empty at the place they are unloaded.

But from the yard's perspective empties come from the trains that bring them.  How do the empties get to the yard?  Do manifest trains set out blocks of empty cars?  Do solid trains of empties come into the yard?

If the empties are manifest set outs then that means a manifest train will pick up cuts of loads.  That also means you don't have to do detail switching.  A car will be either north or south (or what ever directions you use) and the detail switching will be done at the yard at which the manifest train is switched.

If its a solid train then it will most likely be switched wherever the train goes.  If the train is for a steel mill, export or a breaker the coal will most likely not be graded.

Iron ore is a different thing than coal.  In iron ore they are blending a certain chemistry of iron so they mix the various grades of ore to produce a specific product when its dumped into the ship.  Not so with coal.  That is all unique waybills with specific destinations.  For the yard, its not the grade, its the destination.  They do blend coal but the blending is done at destination, not at the mine.

The bottom line is the decision is Ken's.  If you don't want a yardmaster (and I don't understand if by that person you mean a yard crew or a person in addition to the the yard crew) then design the operation where its not needed.  All mines can use any cars, the outbound cars go to other yards to switch and classify.  If you do want the person then make the job where it has something to do.  Different mines need different mixes of cars, and the outbound cars need to be sorted between multiple outbound trains.

...

It's a Job.

Further on mines “ordering”

Further on mines “ordering” empty cars.  I believe this may be applicable to coal mines as well.

For my model’s dozen iron mines, I use an Access database to generate empty car orders for each mine. I use a randomizing function with a minimum and maximum number of cars for each mine, as well as what I call a Fail rate (how often should the function fail to generate a car order) so that some mines don’t always get any cars for a given operating cycle.

The idea is orders are generated and aggregated for the closest North End yard.  The local from that yard heads out with enough empties to satisfy the mines’ orders.  He then drops off empties and picks up any loads, returning to the home North End yard with only loads (and bad order empties if they occur).

You don't need Access. Here is an Excel formula to give you the random number between A and B.  You can change A and B to be cell references.  The addition of 0.5 at the end forces 4/5 rounding of the INT function.

=INT(RAND()*(B-A)+A+0.5)

It could get more complicated if you wish

For Ken L and all,

from an earlier positing by me in a different thread -   

So if you are hauling coal prior to 1958 or even perhaps into the mid 1960's, every loaded car from a mine could be heading a different direction than the car next to it when loaded at the mine, to different customers who may have different requirements for the type of coal car they can handle and the mix of grades of coal that they need for their industry. Just to mix things up a bit....

Just a thought have lived in the tidewater area.

While reading this thread I remembered something about one of the companies adding a blue color to the top of the loads as an advertising gimmick.  Blue coal? Blue flame?   Does anybody remember?  Wasn't that coal intended for heating homes and businesses?

I do remember the long coal drags blocking traffic!

Den

Well, one of the coal

Well, one of the coal companies in Kentucky was/is "Blue Diamond Coal"... might start there. My maternal grandfather was a motorman for them.

Complexity

 There is complexity in loading (sorta) and billing, but that doesn't necessarily mean complexity for the railroad.

The railroad really doesn't care about the size of the coal, from its standpoint its all coal.  The size is between the coal company and the customer.  The railroad has no say in it.  The railroad cares about the destination and the blocking of the car.  They won't switch cars by coal size, they switch them by where the cars go. And even that can be minimal switching.  The thing that decides how much switching is done around the mines is where do the train go taking the coal away from the mines.

If the trains are going to a junction with the main routes that has some sort of yard, then there might not be any blocking on the branch.  If the coal train terminates in a yard then the coal will be blocked to that yard.  I mentioned this before there is a significant difference between iron ore and coal, iron ore is switched so that when the ore is dumped into the boat its a blended grade of ore.  Coal doesn't work that way.

If a coal distributor in Philadelphia orders a car of Lump, 3 cars of Pea and a car of Stoker, the railroad would just see 5 cars for Philadelphia or maybe 5 cars for the junction or 5 cars going east or 5 cars for the big class yard.

...

This has been my personal experience with car card operations as well.  The ops manager put loads in everything [machinery, cattle, chainsaws] but all I see as an operator is a boxcar that needs to go a town, a stock car coming in, and a boxcar going out.

"Would being the Yardmaster

Would depend on who else was operating the layout. Interesting people can make any job fun and grouchy people can spoil the best layout..DaveB