Simple

A car is in one of two states.  It is either enroute to its destination or its at its destination.  No other choices.

​​1, 2 and 6 are often actually the same thing.

​Very nice thought, but its not actually realistic.  Private owner and assigned service cars (in addition to unit train trains) commonly shuttle between the same O-D pairs.  Also a noble goal but somewhat unrealistic for a model railroad.  If I have one industry that uses covered hoppers of cement and i have a cement hopper on the layout guess where its going?  Zero randomness there.

@Dave1905

Dave:

This may get off topic but in the period that you model (I try to focus around pre-1900) is this pretty much the way cars were routed?

Most of my rolling stock were boxcars, quite a few flats, and a few tanks. There were few other types except in my imagination (stock cars for example) and those would go as you describe - simply back and forth.

There are some differences

Dave,

There are a few differences between the states. In Step 1 the car is un-billed, waiting to be allocated to a shipper. In Step 2, it's been assigned to a customer and is enroute. In Step 6, it's enroute to some location where it will await assignment. This could be where it's a foreign road car and the rules say that the handling railroad needs to get it home via the nearest interchange point. Now, it has been given another assignment by it's manager, then it jumps to Step 2.

I agree with your second point about the noble goal.

I only have one insulated box car and it gets to handle all of the assignments that call for that type of car. I hope to pick up some more at the next flea market. I have only one customer that receives hopper cars full of coal, but fortunately I have a few of them, so while some can sit in a staging yard for a few sessions before going back out on the line again.

Period being modeled

Neil,

To add to your topic, I'm kind of in the 1950's to 1980' era when it comes to equipment, but the railroad that I'm in the process of building could handle eras prior to or after that. I'm comfortable with how railroads worked in that time period because that's when I had those part-time jobs for the C&NW and Soo Line.

Tim sent in some good comments on the previous post that cover the more recent era, with many of the cars belonging to private lease operations and the reduction in cars actually owned by the railroads themselves. I think that's also a result of the big railroads wanting to be more bulk carriers and not deal so much with individual cars. It's a lot more efficient and cost-effective to move 100 car grain trains or even 100 car container trains than dealing with 100 box cars all going in different directions.

I'm not certain about how things worked prior to WW II although there is a good video on Youtube that was produced by the C&NW in 1947. I think that I can embed it here:

It's about half an hour long but it's a pretty good marketing film from those days. Plenty of shots of steam and early diesels.

I'm pretty sure that the system that  I've been thinking about would work for most common carrier-types of railroads. It would probably be overkill for logging and mining roads. We'll see how this turns out.

Car Service Directives

Empty Railcars move according to Car Service Directives or CSD rules. Most upon empty release will get routed back towards their origin. If it is an empty Southern Railway Boxcar that interchanged to the BN in Memphis, TN then the BN will give it back in Memphis unless the origin road request differently. This is part of the Car Service Directive. Some might say well the BN should send that empty box to one of their customers to load out to a Southern Railway destination. And this certainly can be done as long as it follows the Car Service Rules. 

These Car Service Rules can be different depending on the type of pool Service the Car is assigned to. Not everything out there running is in some kind of General Service Pool. Not even close. You have shipper assigned pools where the car will be assigned to load out at one specific location and you have Commodity Assigned Pools where the car will only be loaded with one type of product. You also have Various Pools which can be used for various products but limited in scope. For Instance you don't want to load a food grade Covered Hopper with Fertilizer or some other contaminant. 

Something else cars do that is seldom modeled is go to a clean out track prior to loading. This happens pretty regular for boxcars in paper Service. At the Macon, GA hump yard there is a clean out track that can clean boxcars and covered hoppers. For the hoppers they get pushed through a covered shed that has a high pressure wand that can spray 360 degrees. Around June and July a lot of covered hoppers get cleaned from hauling fertilizer the first part of the year so they can haul grain the second part of the year.

Tim

Loading rules

Everyone appears to be missing the ARR requirements for loading foreign boxcars.

there are penalties for not following them.

See the attached below.

Howard Garner 

1900's

Not quite the same.  Pretty much cars were routed home or loaded home.  There weren't assigned pools, the private car fleet wasn't as developed (no ***X reporting marks).  Since there were a lot more short moves (no trucks to handle local moves) more cars stayed home.

There was interchange and a lot of cars moved around.  I had an opportunity to see some of the St Joseph Belt Line (St Joe, MO, owned by the UP) per diem records from around 1910 and I was surprised at the wide range of cars that the SJBL handled.

I intended to handle iron ore to the steel mill in PRR (and subsidiary) GD and GG class cars, cotton to the textile mills in cars from the south and southwest (MP, TP, IGN, SP, SSW, L&N, and southern roads).  Anthracite in cars from the NE (P&R, CNJ, LNE, DL&W, O&W, PRR) and soft coal in mid-Atlantic roads (B&O, N&W, C&O, VGN).  By the way, try finding SE US marked cars in the 1900 era.

EDIT:  Google books have a lot of early 1900's tomes on railroading that could probably provide more scholarly input on routing and car supply matters.

Destinations

I have always viewed the routing engine working on "geography", and that a car has multiple destinations.  the purpose of the "assignment " and "movement" engines of the system is to establish and update those destinations.

I see there being at least one location in the past, two locations in the present and four locations in the future for each current movement:

Past -

1. Origin location :  where the car originated from, which can have some bearing on how the car is routed or handled.

Present -

1. Current location:  the station, track and sequence of the current, last reported location of the car.
2. Current train :  If the car is on a train, the train and sequence number of the car in the train.  A car can have both a current train and a current location. 

Future -

1. Next train :  the next train that will handle the car.
2. Next destination :  The next place the car will go to to get the final destination.
3. Last system destination:  The place the car will leave the railroad/layout.
4. Final destination :  The ultimate destination for the car.

Plus a car has a "block" a designator that groups cars together for handling.

The origin, last system destination and final destination come from the waybill.  The current location, current train come from reportings.  The next train, next destination and block from decision logic in the movement engine.  The key part that is overlooked on most model systems is concept of the "block".  Once you determine the logic to establish blocks, routing is very easy because it reduces the number of options.  

How this might work on my layout.  Blocks are determined by rules at each station and apply to the station that is their current location.  Stations have a "on layout" flag.  If a car has a final destination where the final destination station is not on the layout and the last system destination is not an interchange, then that car would be a "Reading".  Then I define trains by the blocks they carry.  Readings ride a northward thru freight.

If a car has a final system destination of Chadds Ford and it is South of Chadds ford then it picks up a Chadds Ford block.  The Chadds Ford block is assigned to the North Local.   The N Local sets the car out at Chadds Ford going north.  If the car is north of Chadds Ford, it will pick up a Montchanin block.  The Montchanin Block is assigned to the South Local.  Once the car sets out at Montchanin, south of Chadd Ford, the block rules at Montchanin apply.  Since it is south of Chadds Ford, it picks up a Chadds Ford block.  The Chadds Ford block is assigned to the North Local. The N Local sets the car out at Chadds Ford going north. 

Since the routing rules are set up by large blocks, one set of rules can handle a wide range of destinations.  Another critical thing that modelers overlook is that in reality there are only a few routes on a model railroad and in reality a very few outbound "destinations".  Take a Lance Mindheim industrial branch.  In reallity there is only one route on and only one route off.  Doesn't matter where the car goes.  If its going to industry, its going to come from the staging track and go to industry, if its outbound, in reality the only place its going is to staging.

Car Service Directives and Loading Rules

Tim & Howard - Excellent info!

This clears up some of my confusion on the loading of foreign cars subject. When I watched the video (for the third time) that I embedded further up in this discussion, I noticed that Santa Fe and Central of Georgia box cars were being loaded in the C&NW Proviso freight house. Your info explained it.

I did a little more digging on the net and came up with these two interesting links:

AAR Guide for Railroads: https://www.railinc.com/rportal/documents/18/260641/GuideforRailroads.pdf

AAR Code of Car Service Rules: https://www.railinc.com/rportal/alf_docs/Circulars/OT-10.pdf

I can now, prototypically, load foreign road cars and I'm guessing that these rules have been in place since at least the 40's based on the video.

@Tim - Car Service Directives

Question: When you were managing those cars, did you plan ahead for their usage? Meaning, did you already have future assignments for some of the cars, even though they weren't at their unloading point yet?

Just curious...

Pending dispo

Assigned cars have a pending disposition, when they become empty, they automagically pick up the return route.

Railroads have programmed the car service rules into the system so EVERY car has a disposition at all times.  As soon as a car comes empty its is returned according to the default rules.  The car distributor can then intervene to reassign the car to a specific loading. 

Remember that sending a car to a holding point is the exact same as sending it to an industry.  A holding point is a destination.  Instead of a car going into AP status (actually placed) when spotted at industry, it goes to HD status (hold) when it is placed in the hold track.

The last time I distributed cars was back in 1980 so it has changed a bit, software and car service rules wise.

@Dave - Pending disposition

OK - got it.

So, every car has a place to go after it's been unloaded, be that to the next customer for loading, or someplace where it will sit pending it's next assignment.

That info, along with the knowledge that lines are allowed, actually encouraged to load foreign road cars, helps my plans. It was interesting to read in those AAR car directives that if indeed empties are to go to their home road, they do it at the interchange where they arrived, which might not necessarily be the nearest one.

Routeing MT's home

That info, along with the knowledge that lines are allowed, actually encouraged to load foreign road cars, helps my plans. It was interesting to read in those AAR car directives that if indeed empties are to go to their home road, they do it at the interchange where they arrived, which might not necessarily be the nearest one.

Mostly true.

There is SCO 90 that short circuits the roundabout way some cars would be routed over several roads to get home.   This requires certain roads at certain interchanges to accept certain reporting marks for forwarding to/towards their home road.

Read about it here.

https://www.railinc.com/rportal/documents/18/260641/GuideforRailroads.pdf

Howard Garner

Car Pools

Every car I managed was placed in a pool. I could change the amount of cars in each pool or decide what type of cars would be assigned into each pool number. When I took over the non-Automotive 60' boxcars. I found all different types of 60' cars assigned to the same pool. The first thing I did was separate the cars into pools based on each type. For instance, I put all the 100 ton 60' High cube single plug door boxcars in one pool and put all of the 100 ton 60' high cube sliding door boxcars in another. I also did this for the 70 ton 60' regular cube cars the same way. 

Customers would go online to AccessNS log on to their profile which was set up so they could choose which car type to order. Some customers only wanted one type so they would only have one option and others wanted four or five options. This allowed for a better chance of making sure they received all the cars they needed in time.

So in order to fill car orders I created movement instructions or MI's. These movement instructions could be set by priority. 01, 02, 03, 04. A level 01 MI would fill first. I would use the lower levels to just make sure the cars were going somewhere, usually based on historical data. During slow times cars could start filling up yards so eventually cars would end up in storage if the business levels weren't there. During really busy times it would be just the opposite with customers begging for cars to fill orders. When it came to that point that is when I would start looking for foreign cars in similar pools to mine to fill orders. The big problem was it required more work to find out where the customers was billing the loads. And that wasn't necessarily an easy thing to do especially if a customer loaded cars to multiple locations via multiple routes. Example one large paper mill loads boxcars to locations on NS, CSX, BNSF, and KCS. And on top of that said customer loads an average of 15 to 20 cars a day. Now how do you tell a customer to make sure they only load the KCS boxcars to loads destined for the KCS. Do you think they will? Probably not. Now that KCS car is headed to CA on the BNSF and the KCS Car Manager is calling you asking you who gave you the authority to use their car?

Tim

This particular thread

This particular thread highlights one of the problems I have with other computer programs for car forwarding - they don't take the Car Loading Rules into account. But it gets more complicated for somebody creating such a program, since the rules adherence, as wel as the rules themselves changed over the years.

From about the '20s through at least the '50s, the rules indicated that you were to load an available foreign car that was:

1. Destined for the home road; or
2. Destined for a location between the loading road and the home road; or
3. Destined for a location beyond the home road, so the home road could participate in the movement.

Sounds simple enough. But prior to WWII, adherence was around 90% if I recall. Post WWII it had dipped to around 60%. Also, during specific times (such as the annual grain rush), there were shortages of cars. During the grain rush, it was box cars. That altered the movements of the cars too.

Railroads wanted to get empties off of their road by midnight to avoid having to pay another day's worth of Per Diem. On the New Haven, (and probably most roads in the era) the rules required them to send empties back to the junction point where they were received, unless the car was owned by a railroad with a direct connection to the New Haven, in which case it was routed to the nearest junction with that railroad. There were further exceptions, such as all CN cars were routed to the CV in New London. 

Another factor that is a problem for model railroads, but not the real railroads, is the mix of cars themselves. Some cars are much more common than others. For example, if I had a load coming from Chicago to the New Haven, it would be fairly common for it to be a Pennsy car. I have a lot of them in my roster: X25, X29, X35, X37, and X38 box cars for example. But some of those cars are more common than others. For example the PRR only had one X35. So I'd want that to show up maybe one out of every 10 or 20 ops sessions, not every one.

The mix of cars is important as well. In 1950, 26% of the box car fleet were single sheathed composite box cars. Box cars shorter than 40' accounted for about 8%, and of these, 71% were CN and CP Fowler patent single sheathed composite box cars.

This is a list started by George Losse that I've expanded a bit. It shows the largest classes of box cars in 1952 and roughly how many are likely to show up in a group of 100 cars:

I've also been collecting railroad Routing Guides that provide the approved routes from a given railroad to other destinations. These routes are as specific as from a given station on one road to the specific station on another and can run hundreds of pages. This can affect the operations on the railroad. I model a single city, but outbound cars can be routed in one of three directions. A car headed to Chicago can actually be headed in either of those three directions - north, south or west.

I'm using a spreadsheet that Mike Rosenberg created, that Chris also adopted and we've been tweaking it for some time with Mike. What I like about it is that it handles the non-railroad aspects of the car movement. Industries ordering cars. Then I can fill those movements by selecting the cars myself, so I can take into account the car loading and movement rules, the New Haven car movement rules, build a representative mix on the layout, and account for common and rare cars too. While I'm sure it's possible to create a computer program that will account for all of this, it would be very complicated.

Something else that is very important to me is that the program not only print prototypical paperwork, but that it allow me to decide which paperwork to print, and which paperwork I will do by hand. I love the railroad paperwork. That's part of the fun of running the railroad for us. At my sessions, I have a freight agent that receives the waybills from the conductors, then (prototypically) writes out the switchlists for the crews. He then provides the waybills for the outbound trains. So I'm OK with a system that lets you use it with "little or no paperwork" but that's not a primary goal for me, and I would like to make sure I can use "all of the paperwork" if desired.

The other factor that is usually missed in programs like this is that sometimes I want to just run the railroad. Any computer program that tracks the movements of specific cars, needs to know the location of that specific car at all times. But if a crew makes a mistake, or a car misses its movement, that can throw the system off. Mike's spreadsheet does away with this. All we do is mark whether there is a car at a given location or not. It doesn't care what car, or even what kind of car. All it needs to know is whether there is a car there, so it can decide whether to move it or not. All of the car tracking is done with the waybill that can move with the car, whether I'm moving it via an ops session or not. If I choose not to use the waybills, that's not a problem either. The waybills are generated (or pulled, since I save them) prior to the next operating session when setting it up anyway. So a car without a bill is addressed then. Or left without a bill, since that occurred in real life too. The Agent will received one in the "mail" during the session, then the movement of the car will be known.

Another problem is that cars are typically assigned trains throughout the session. On a large layout, with many trains run, a car may be scheduled to move from an inbound freight (from staging) to a through train to another yard, to a local freight to be delivered to an industry. All prototypical in a sense. Except that we often have people waiting for a late train to receive their car. So I would like to see a computer program that designates the routing (off-layout> yard #1> yard #2> industry) that allows the agents and yardmasters to build the trains as the cars come in. A given car may be expected at 10:00, but if it comes at 2:00 it's irrelevant. No train will wait for it, and it will go on the next train headed in the right direction, just like the prototype.

I'm happy to help in any way I can. It would be very cool to see a program that can handle prototypical car movements. I get that not everybody may be as interested in many of the things I'd like to see. However, even those that aren't concerned about prototypical car movements, mix, etc., would benefit from a system that does that anyway. 

Randy

Tim's post about car pools

Tim's post about car pools reminds me of some other rules that I've come across back in the post-war era. 

The New Haven had a rule that said a 50' box car was not to be used for loading unless the lading required that size car. I also have several orders for specific cars that place them in a semi-captive service. This might have been for as little as 6 months, maybe even less. For example, New Haven's covered hoppers were assigned to specific industries (which happened to be offline).

Also, keep in mind that some roads had cars that would never leave the home road. These were often cars like the NYC Pacemaker cars for the first few years. So loading a Pacemaker car (typically for LCL only, I think), would not have a destination off of the NYC system. 

Private cars often had specific rules. Tank cars had to be waybilled (instead of running on an MTY car card) and returned to the owner. They could not be reloaded. Sometimes it wasn't just private cars. On the New Haven there was a rule that Canadian cars were not to be reloaded and sent back to Canada for reuse. I can't recall if loading for a Canadian destination was OK, but for some reason I think it wasn't. I'd have to dig out that paperwork again.

I'm pretty sure that New Haven hoppers were rarely loaded to an offline destination. I think they were primarily for moving bituminous online from all of the coal that was shipped in by water from the Baltimore area. 

Another factor for routing that may be important on some layouts is overdimension loads. I happen to model a line that handled them to avoid clearance issues on the Shoreline. Depending on the layout, certain routes may be not be able to handle overdimension loads. It would be easy enough to have a toggle in a computer program to identify a given load (not a specific car) as overdimension. Although depending on how you model loads, it might always be the same car.

Randy

Real time car routing

Randy,

Take a look at ProTrak.  It does almost everything you have been talking about

web site http://protrak.org/wpt/

Check out the ProTrak weekends and plan to visit one.  May in the Baltimore area and October in Baden, ON

Just a very satisfied user.

Howard Garner

ProTrak

Hi, Howard - 

I stumbled across that a while ago and haven't had a chance to look at it in detail. I'll have to do that. It looks quite impressive. Thanks for the reminder, I've wanted to take a closer look.

Randy

@Randy - All, some, or no paperwork!

Good points!

I like that chart. When I was doing HO, I was able to keep the cars on the line pretty much in sync with the late 50's through late 60's. That's a little harder to do in N for the area of the country that I want to represent, so I'm accepting a few out-of-era cars at the moment. I'm keeping that chart for the future though.

Concerning routing, which has been the topic of many of the comments in this series of posts, I think that we need to come to a point where we use some, but not necessarily all, of the prototypical methods and procedures. We already accept some compromises in the physical side of our simulations and we will probably have to compromise a bit in the business side as well. Our locomotives are run by electric motors drawing power from either the rails or batteries. The couplers kind of look like their prototype cousins, but we cause them to uncouple by using magnets, sticks, or our fingers. These adjustments are all because we are trying to do the same thing that the 1:1 scale railroads are doing, but in miniature.

The physical structure of each modeler's railroad dictates to what degree it will be able to simulate interchange with other railroads, even with other divisions of the same line. The line that I am in the process of building, and the two clubs where I was part of operations, only had a couple of interchange points so routing to and from off-line destinations wasn't a complicated problem. I can see that people with multiple interchange points can run into a real challenge trying to figure out where to send cars.

The software system that I'm testing only allows for loading and unloading locations. What happens in between is up to the humans. I think that this is similar to what you described. It requires me to allocate empty cars, build switch lists, and update car locations, but this is done using the QR code scanner or the computer keyboard. Some human looks at the car orders and selects the cars to fill them. The computer provides a prioritized list based on location but the human can override the machine.

Once car orders have been filled, a human, or humans, decide at each station which cars are  to be handled by which jobs. Again this is done by using the QR code scanner, a PC, or a mobile device. Lining up cars with jobs can take place at anytime during the operating session so that allows for newly arrived cars to be added into a block for later pickup without this having to be decided at the start of the operating session.

Crews are provided with printed (or on-line) switch lists that can be updated even after the job is running on the line. When the job terminates, the conductor updates the system with where cars were left. Again, this can be done using the scanner, keyboard, or smart phone.

I'm working on a post that I hope to have up soon that describes this process in a bit more detail. Thanks for the interest and maybe we can work it out for you to do some more advanced testing of this software.

@Howard & @ Randy - ProTrak

I've briefly reviewed ProTrak and JMRI Operations but in both cases I wonder about why both of those systems went into what seems to be extreme detail. It's possible for large club-size layouts that these systems would be a solution, but both seemed to be a bit of over-kill for home layouts, even big ones.

For example, setting up ProTrak asks questions about direction (North-South vs. East-West), whether you are using jointed or welded rail, the modeling scale being used, etc... I'm curious to know why these are necessary. JMRI Operations asks similar seemingly irrelevant questions about direction, modeling scale, and maximum number of locomotives ever to be assigned to a train. I am certain that there are good reasons for their inclusion, but at the moment they are not obvious to me.

Now, as a software developer and college IT instructor, I know better than to question the decisions of the designers of either of these products. They both are widely use and well received, but I think there is a place in the model railroad world for a less complicated system that can still make operation sessions more interesting with much less complexity.

Why all the data

For example, setting up ProTrak asks questions about direction (North-South vs. East-West), whether you are using jointed or welded rail, the modeling scale being used, etc... I'm curious to know why these are necessary. JMRI Operations asks similar seemingly irrelevant questions about direction, modeling scale, and maximum number of locomotives ever to be assigned to a train. I am certain that there are good reasons for their inclusion, but at the moment they are not obvious to me.

Some of the data is not needed for operations, but is used for other things.

Like many programs, ProTrak has its origins from back in teh 1980's.  In 1999 it converted to windows.  Since then it has added many more optional items, Narrow gauge and car ferry among them.  Even if you do not see it, there is "accounting" taking place and reports can be generated showing your operating ratio and your expenses and income.  Wear and tear on your rails is just one of the many hidden expenses, but weled/joined rail does make a difference.

It is possible to start small and build from there. Use the options that you need and add the others later. Several small layouts do use ProTrak.

Myself, I like the switch lists, the yard cut lists so the cars get onthe correct yard track, the customer driven car order system, and the return routing of cars being correct.  There are many other reasons, but that highlights mine.

Howard Garner