Excel Spreadsheets

Any chance you'd be willing to share the speadsheets?

Office software

You can also use MS Access to create car cards and waybills.  But a spreadsheet program is much easier and available free from Open Office.

I also use Excel or another spreadsheet to create timetables, train order forms, clearance forms, switch list forms, dispatcher train sheets, train registers, etc.  Any form that has columns and a formatted appearance.

I use Powerpoint or a presentation software to draw track diagrams.

Both Powerpoint and Excel are used to create signage for both the fascia and buildings.

Following

Following

Files

I attached the two files to the bottom of the original posting on my site. If you re-follow the link in top post in this thread you'll find the links at the bottom of the page.

Thousand Thanks

Thank you.

Thanks Chris

Much appreciated!

New and Improved Car Cards - now with logos!

So I was inspired to figure out adding different RR logos in the top corner of my car cards:

I think it looks pretty sharp myself.

Full details on my blog: 

http://vanderheide.ca/blog/2018/03/20/excel-car-cards-revisted-adding-logo-images-to-the-cards/

Logo

Is the logo an image or a "font"?  I know some car card systems have used a "font" that is railroad symbols, but an image would be more versatile.

Logos

They're images. I mostly found RR images in Google Image Search and cropped or resized them to use on my cards.

Timely info!

Hi Chris

Great posts as usual, and timely as well.  I've had my inventory in Excel for ages, recently played with EMRI, but wasn't convinced I wanted to lock into a program so obviously 'mature'.  JMRI entices as well, though it seems to suffer from constant change, resulting in new 'features' cropping up all the time.  At least if I stick with Excel, the bugs are all mine.  I'm going to experiment with this, though I'm not sold on car cards vs switch lists.

Blair

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Following.

Waybill Storage Box

Of course if you're going to have a bunch of waybills for your operation, you'll need to keep them all organized

The box is made from 3/16" foam core board and has overall dimensions of (roughly) 10x10" (precisely, it's 9 15/16" wide by 10 5/16" deep to account for the internal size of the pockets plus the width of all the material) with 24 (4x6) sorting/storage slots that are 2 1/4" wide x 1 1/2" deep to fit the waybill cards. The depth of the outer walls is 4", the depth of the inner pocket dividers are 3". I cut a drop in the front of the box down to match the 3" depth of the pockets to made it easier to see and access the front row(s) of waybills. The central dividers are notched halfway up where they cross each other to form a simple but sturdy interlocking series of halved joints (like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halved_joint) I didn't glue the dividers to each other due to the nice tight fit of the halved joints, but glued the whole divider assembly, the outer walls and base together with regular white glue.

The labelled card dividers within each pocket are just pieces of card stock (actually just the trimmings of the car card sheet after the car cards are cut out) cut slightly longer than the waybills so they stick up above them.

Waybill box

I have done about the same thing to organize my waybills, only I used some picture storage boxes from Michaels craft store and sheet styrene for the dividers.  I organize them by station and industry since all of them are two move waybills.  The blue ones are empty returns.  The small box at the bottom is the "refile" box.  When I pull the waybills from the car cards during rebilling, I put them in that little box and then after the billing is done, refile them all by station and industry based on the first move.

Caboose Assignments and Occupied Boarding Cars

Did a bit of playing around this evening and whipped up a few more inserts in excel for use with my car cards:

Caboose assignment slips, to go in a car card for a caboose indicating a train assignment, and some slips that can insert into the pockets for work outfit cars to indicate occupied cars that require special handling/treatment.

Examples of the inserts with car cards. Left to right: standard freight waybill, occupied boarding car, caboose.

I also introduced a bit of colour variation into the car cards themselves by printing them on different colours of paper (cover stock), distinguishing types of equipment. The manila card at left is the standard car card colour. I'm now using grey for MOW/service equipment, white for cabooses, and yellow for passenger equipment (not shown).

Following

Following

Assignments

I like the assigned caboose cards.  Interesting concept would be to print cards with your "regular" operator's names on them and put them in the pockets.  Then the caboose would have to be put on whichever train that operator was working that session.  The caboose would be assigned to the conductor.  Hmmmmm.

Also I have borrowed your CC&WB spreadsheets for a friend to use.  Very nice work.  Made some changes to the top to get rid of some of the field descriptions and make the reporting marks larger.  I found that if you change the printing order on the waybill page to odd "lines" in the first column and "even" lines in the second column, you can create de facto 4 move waybills.  Moves one and two are on the odd lines in the data table (ie Ore-1, Ore-3, etc) and moves three and four are in the even lines (ie Ore-2, Ore-4, etc).  Then cut them out as 5 long waybills and fold it over to make a 4 sides one.

Dave

Glad you found it useful.

Varying the assignment cards to assign to particular operators instead of trains is a good idea and only a very minor change.

Car Card Storage

Having recently realized I had car cards lying around all over the place when not in use, I started thinking of a storage solution. Did a search here for ideas and came across this posting. Built this box as per your dimensions and it turned out great. Excellent light weight idea. The only problem I had was not having a sharp enough of a blade in my knife. Snagged the foam a bit when cutting making some gagged edges.

Two sheets of Elmers foam board ( allowance for mistakes) Very inexpensive.

Just wanted to acknowledge a thumbs up on this idea. Thanks.

Blocking on Car Cards

Went back and updated my car card format a little so that empty car cards with an "Return when empty" destination revealed can also have a matching block code displayed like the "waybill" inserts.

So empty cars using the car card's "return to" instructions as an "empty car" waybill show the same blocking and can be classified using the same information on the waybills.

Photo shows how the block code and coloured bar on the car card matches up with the existing waybill inserts. (Again note - the coloured bar matches the block code/name above it, it's just easy visual reinforcement and not something that needs to be looked up elsewhere with a "magic decoder ring" (but the blocking diagram and layout overview map is also in my timetable))

In the example of these cards, Franz is the location of the interchange with Canadian Pacific, so all my CP cars have this as their return-to location and blocking. Other return points on my layout are Oba or Hearst (CN interchanges), Sault Ste. Marie (south staging and connection to SOO Line, CP Rail), and Wawa (ore processing plant - my empty hoppers return here). Most home-road gondolas and flatcars have no specific "return to" and will either get billed during session staging or stored empty at the main layout yard.

I also do have a number of generic "dead head"/empty move waybill inserts to move any car to a desired place without giving crews specific instructions, but having the empty-return-to and block on the car card means this can work without an insert as well.