Typically a crew associated

Typically a crew associated with the elevator or loading facility will handle the spotting of the train. Those crews are not employed by the operating railroad in most cases, though at some locations a yard crew might handle spotting the train. As far as the operating railroad crews are concerned, the train is dropped off at the facility and tied down or in the case of an outbound train it is released by the facility and ready for the railroad crew to pick up. 

In other words, I wouldn't bother to put someone in charge of spotting the train at 1mph unless you wanted to punish them or unless they really liked moving at a snail's pace. To me it would be better to move the train by either the inbound crew or the outbound crew and not fool with simulating the loading process.

Loops

It would be a very boring job.  Spot the first car.  Load or unload.  Pull up one car (or number loaded or unloaded.) Load or unload. Pull up one car (or number loaded or unloaded.) Load or unload. Pull up one car (or number loaded or unloaded.) Load or unload. Pull up one car (or number loaded or unloaded.) Load or unload. Pull up one car (or number loaded or unloaded.) Load or unload. Ad nauseum.

If its a flood loader or trestle dump with air operated rapid discharge hoppers, you just pull under/over the spot at some slow speed 1-3 mph.  Until the whole train is finished.  Still boring.

The whole idea of those loops is to avoid switching, avoid breaking the train line, essentially to make it as boring as possible.

Boring

The most boring day I have ever had on the railroad was unloading a 110 car corn train for an Ethanol plant. Once I setup the creep control and started to move we proceeded for the next 6 hours at .02mph. Yes .02 it was soooo boring. I have also flood loaded coal in West Virginia, we clipped along at a little over 1MPH in Wyoming the train was flying along at almost 2MPH. 
 

Regardless, unless you just want the animation and have the real estate I would skip making someone watch the train. Unless you are going to use live coal loads which would require someone to do a lot of work spotting each car and pushing the button to load or unload. 

There are non loop unit train facilities for coal, grain, oil, aggregates, etc that would keep a person busy for a session of either running the train across part of the layout then spotting it. Or starting at the facility, switching out Bad Order cars, sometimes swapping blocks of cars, building the train and then running it to staging. 

Loop track industries

I'm extremely fascinated with loop tracks to the point I created a layout plan with 1 circle (grain loading) and 1 balloon (coal flood loader) track. I then had it published as a two part article in MRH Running Extra (October & November 2020) including a traffic plan for the layout.

The traffic plan included movements within the industry to go from empty to loaded cars and vice versa. But would I actually have a non-road crew run the loading cycle at these 2 industries? Heck no! As others said: that would be a boring job.

For the circle grain loader track it would suffice to get the crew to get on the train, do their break tests whatnot and ask for permission to head out on the main. For an arriving empty unit train, the road crew would arrive, spot the unit train on the circle track and tie it down. The position of an arriving or departing train in this facility would look the same. So no actual need to model the unloading.

For the coal loader however, the flood loader was halfway in the balloon track. So the arriving road crew would pull up to right in front of the flood loader and tie down. In order to model the departing train, someone would have to move the train past the flood loader and tie it down near the mainline switch. I never envisioned someone to do the steady 1-2mph loading job by ensuring a single operating session would not span more than a 24 hours time period. In between operating sessions you could simply move the unit train to the departing spot near the mainline switch. When the next operating session starts, the road crew would find a departure ready coal train.

Now if you want live coal loads though, you'd have to model the slow pace past the flood loader. In that case I'd highly suggest automating the coal loading with some microprocessor logic to detect the start and ends of a coal car, control the flow rate of coal falling from the bunker, keep track of the fill status of the coal bunker and control the train speed. A Prof silencer on steroids, based on a modified DCC++ sketch, servo control, several infrared sensors and a "reaching end of block detector" likely would work. Seeing a computer do this would actually be pretty cool to see while operators are running other trains.

Slow speed weighing

The Missabe had/has ore flood loaders on its line with the prominence of taconite, but that is outside of my preferred era. However, speaking just to the painfully slow movements for operators, the Missabe did, and still does, weigh ore or taconite coming into the major yards of Proctor and Two Harbors.

Cars are weighed in-line as they pass very slowly over the scale tracks.  This is done at perhaps 2 mph at most, and in the steam era, incoming ore trains only weighed half the ore train using the road crew.  They cut the train, and yarded the first half, leaving the Proctor Yard switch to pull the back half of the train through the scales.

We don't split the train, but we just ask the operators to proceed through the scale slowly.  Operators tend to find their preferred/tolerated speed to do the "weighing".

Proctor yard had a scale on each side of the scalehouse - the small white building barely visible to the left, so two trains could be weighing at once.  Even so, it was a frequent bottleneck. It can also be one on my layout for the same reason.

Here a 1950s shot of two trains inbound at the scale.  Note the various colors of ore, and a few smaller 50-ton cars in the trains.

So??

Hi Peter, all,

So being "less boring" beats more prototypical actual operation of our model trains by ruling out operational model loaders and similar operations just because driving a train around a loop at slow speed is "boring"??  

I find this somewhat ironic given the push towards "more prototypical operation" of our model trains with rules, timetables etc. 

Yes its boring - All industrial activity is "boring" by definition when its running "right", including our model trains Simply because industry (real or model) makes its real or imagined money that way - by doing the "same thing" all the time (but with small variations - Do you want a white, black or red car delivered from your model automobile plant??).

You really don't want to be around big-time industry when it's "not running right". Yes it gets "interesting" really quick, but it can get downright dangerous too. Boring is "good".  

The loading and unloading operations are very easily camouflaged by most model industries because there is very little visual difference between the loaded and the unloaded condition for most model railroad car types EXCEPT flat cars and open-top hopper cars like coal cars. 

Who says that you have to actually go into "dead-slow creep" mode for most of your ops session? You need to get inventive here and "cheat" with the BHOG loader for these 2 types of cars. You give the train crew the job of actually loading these types rail vehicles with drop-on loads for flat cars or drop-in loads for coal or ore hoppers. Assign some arbitrary x minutes for this loading duty while the train is in the balloon loop. 

If you want to reduce the loading time in the loop? Then run a shorter unit train. Nowhere does it say that our model unit trains have to BHP iron ore or Powder River coal monster lengths. 

What is not boring is the level of concentration needed by your train crew while they are loading "live loads" from an operational flood loader or similar. You need a "precision approach" to driving your model locomotive that is more aligned with operating small shunting layouts than that required for "main-line run" type operations typical of larger layouts.  So what if you have to stop each car in the correct spot and push a button to to load each car - this is a real railroad operation that can be modelled in miniature, but only IF you are prepared to expend some effort. For inspiration here for a non-flood loader operation have a look at the concentration required to load out individual cars using a different type loader check out Mario and Bice's Consolidated Nickel and their main topic thread on here  

Yaron's approach can also work if you are not prepared to manually drive (so ho-hum boring) the train while loading under an operational loader. There are Youtube's out there showing i/r or photocell sensors to control the loading gate on flood loaders. Some of these included lifting the loading shroud to clear the end of each wagon after loading.   

Here's on approach in HO where the loading shroud is set at just above car height (at about 30 seconds to load each car)

and another in N-scale 

Yes it can be done, and it looks so much better if your trains look like they are actually "doing stuff" rather than just running between assigned stopping points.

Irony

There is a certain irony in suggesting that slow loader/unloader operation on a model railroad requires more throttle control because that's one place that real railroads have automated things to have little crew interaction.  As far as the 1960's the UP installed "hump controls" in locomotives to be used as leaders on coal trains so the slow speed could be dialed in and the crew wouldn't have to be twitching the throttle.  Similarly on the unloading side the spotting of cars in the rotary dumps is all done by an indexing arm the crew (if there even is one on the train) doesn't touch any of the controls after the first car is spotted.

Dave1905

I have found DCC decoders need BEMF to run slow enough to load trains at the loadout and I have thought of the irony you mentioned.  I have to spot the first 3 cars at my dumper before the indexer takes over so the precise control is appreciated there as well.

Loading and emptying the live loads in the coal trains is the only aspect of model railroading my kids have shown interest in.

I can see how loading and dumping could be boring but I also find running the hotshot from staging to staging and having everyone get out of my way sort of boring as well.

On another forum, one member is in the same club as the Doug Nagel, the guy that built the model of the Sommerset rotary dumper.  He mentioned the coal trains are pretty popular at shows.  He built the loadout to load the trains and Doug empties them.

Unit grain or tanks, I would probably take the approach John, Oztrains, mentioned and have the crews tie down the "loads" when they arrive and have another crew take the "empties" away.

Paul

Credit where credits is due..

Hi Paul, all,

Please put the credit where credit is due for 

I'm sorry but that was Yaron's idea in Loop Track Industries above. And it's a pretty good approach given that there is no visual difference between loaded and unloaded model unit grain, tank, air-discharge hoppers, fully-enclosed autoracks, boxcars etc. These type of trains can start and end their journeys at many different model industries.

Yaron's idea might also apply to container trains, especially if you are running a consist of corporate blocks of containers like for Amazon or someone similar between large warehousing sites that handle the end distribution. These containers ideally would be travelling loaded both ways. But if there is a traffic imbalance, some empty containers will have to go back to where they can get another load  Again there is no visual difference between platforms loaded with containers whether they are "full" or "empty" containers, But if you run a train of empty platforms into a balloon loop then provided that the platforms are set up for it, you could Big Hand load a full train of containers relatively quickly at probably well under 30 seconds for each empty platform. 

Yes there are (expensive) operating container cranes out there. But tying up a train crew while loading/unloading containers with such an operating accessory is probably a waste of a crew. The crane operator should be able to move the train as required to bring the required platforms (with or without containers) into the reach of the crane.  

Thoughts on operating/loading/unloading this type of train via a balloon loop?    

Containers

Containers are generally loaded and unloaded on a ramp, not a loop.  More efficient that way.