My best advice is to attend one

The best way to find out about Ops sessions is to attend one.  The Ops SIG is one great way to attend then as is you local NMRA.  You will also get to try different ways of doing things that you may not have considered in the first place

Steve

Mutant op sessions ...

I found that when I started operating on the 3rd (present) BC&SJ that I kept seeing different ways of doing things. Sometimes they were even better than the current way. Sometimes, a bottleneck in operation would prompt changing the trackage a bit (sometimes moving a turnout a short distance or adding a crossover makes a difference).

I'd suggest starting to operate before going to finished scenery in case you discover the need (or desire) for a major rearrangement of the track. Aside from that go ahead and start running. Changes are pretty easy to make.

The guide I used for my ops plan was locals to service the industries and take the pickups back to the yard. Through trains (haulers) stop at the yards and swap blocks. Cars going to local industries are given to the yard crew, outbounds (industry pickups) are inserted in the through train. Not every train stops at every location. Each industry gets switched by (usually) one train. Locals can be yard to staging handling industries on the way, staging to yard, or turns leaves yard, does industries, returns to the same yard. Having a branchline helps keep who ever is directing traffic on their toes. Gotta merge/split the branchline and mainline traffic.

Is your trackplan cast in concrete (or plywood) at this point, or is it still in early construction stages?

Charlie

Operations

Paraphrasing what you have said.

You have a secondary BNSF line that was spun off as a shortline called the West Central Minnesota Railway.  Once that happened the BNSF has no right to operate on the line, nor does it have a requirement to dispatch it.

I don't see a problem with the scenario.  Here's some technicolor if you are interested.

When the coal plant was built, the utility negoiated a contract with the BNSF to haul coal to the interchange with the WCMR and for the WCMR to use a WCMR crew to haul the coal to the power plant.  The BNSF can make a straight interchange in which case the WCMR gets a cut of the revenue, but would be responsible to pay the BNSF horsepower hours and fuel for the use of their engines.  Or the BNSF could hand it over to the WCMR as a haulage rights train, where the cars and engines remain in the BNSF's account but the train is crewed and operated by the WCMR.  Or the WCMR could grant the BNSF trackage right in which case the BNSF keeps the cars and engines in its account and provides the crew.  Each scenario has different levels of cost, risk and revenue, with interchange being  the higher revenue cost and risk, and trackage rights the least cost, risk and revenue.

The BNSF might dispatch it but more likely the shortline would contract out with a company that does dispatching for shortlines.  I know one shortline in Missouri contracted its dispatching to an outfit in Vermont (aside: Federal regulations require a dispatcher of a US railroad to be physically located in the US so they will be subject to FRA authority).

You can use handwritten lists, you just have to write them. 

Car cards and waybills will work also.  The combination of a car card and waybill makes the equivalent of a prototype waybill.  A lot of people get hung up on the paper.  They will say "real railroads don't have car cards", but if you think of car card or combination of a car card and waybill as a "waybill" then its very prototypical (aside: depending on the era and situation, a case could be made that real railroads did have car cards).

As has been suggested, if you have the opportunity to operate on a couple model railroads, do so.  There are dozens of ways to skin a cat and even prototype operations vary by railroad and era.  So don't be afraid to try new things.  Every time I find a free operating system, I try it, just to see if it has some new ideas.  I've tried JMRI Operations and Bob's model railroad software referenced in another thread, even though I use car cards, wrote my own Access application to generate them and really don't see me switching right now.  Its still interesting to try them out.

Charlie, the track is down

Charlie, the track is down but I am  willing to make changes. I have torn out stuff that where the scenery was in place and would do it again if I feel it's justified. 

I am not aware of any operating sessions within 100 miles, and I know a few modelers in that area. Many of them are people I would rely on to help operate this railroad. I don't think anyone in the area is holding operating sessions, but if I find someone I would surely be willing to attend and learn. One of the joys of living in a rural area, where there are 4 stoplights in the County and it's touch and go if the population would reach 5 figures. 

I'm trying to come up with something that is challenging, but that won't frustrate a bunch of us who have never done this before and will have a hard time getting together as all will have to travel between 50 and 100 miles to attend. 

My basic concept aligns with what you say about locals mixed with haulers. This seems to make sense to me.

Jim

Thanks for the ideas

Thanks for the ideas on interchange vs. haulage vs. trackage rights. That is the kind of stuff that I want to be able to explain as it makes for a more believable story. There's enough fantasy in this plan without introducing more un-needed questions. 

The contract dispatcher idea works. Will give that some more thought. 

Having never used car cards and waybills I am in no position to judge them but the idea of cycling the same car back to the same place seems unrealistic to me. I will take your advice to try new things. Been spending some time messing with JMRI Operations and it seems like it has potential . 

Most of all, THANK YOU for the input. That's just the kind of comments that will help me firm this story up in my mind, which is what I have to do to be able to explain it (sell it) to others.

Jim

Cycling

There is nothing that says you have to use the 4 move waybills.  I have a mix on my layout and change out the ones in staging.

I thing the concept of "randomness" is overdone on a model railroad.  In reality cars that stay in service between two points is not all that uncommon.  Virtually all the unit coal trains that use private owner equipment cycle between one or two mines and one or two utilities.  SATX 1234 is only going to be seen at one or two coal mines in Wyoming that are less than 50 miles apart and will only be unloaded at a coal fired power plant outside San Antonio. I model the Reading so I notice Reading cars.  There was one RDG boxcar that cycled between a stamping plant in Reading, PA and an auto assembly plant warehouse near Everman , TX over a period 5 years back in the 1980's.  Same car, same origin, same destination, trip after trip.

That is not uncommon with pooled or specialized cars (anything that is not a plain sliding door boxcar, open top hopper, mill gon or plain flatcar).  Tank cars will certainly return to the same shipper time and time again.  Prior to the 1990's, each type of automobile had a different configuration of tie downs in auto racks, so even auto racks tended to stay in the same service.

If there is a yard or yards in the middle of the car's trip on your layout, it makes the idea of "randomness" even less important.  If a train brings a car into the yard, the car is switched, then a switcher or local spots the car at industry or the local or switcher pulls the car from industry, takes it to the yard, its switched and a train takes it out of the yard, then from the standpoint of either the switcher/local or through freight, the moves are the same, regardless of the car.  The switcher always moves a car from the yard to the industry and back, regardless of the car, the moves are teh same.  From a practical standpoint, if you care about commodity and car type (the beer distributor only gets RBL's, the oil dealer only gets non-pressurized tank cars) then you probably have a fixed roster and will repeat the same cars any way you go.  If you have 5 RBL's, then guess what, one of them is going to the beer distributor and its not going to the oil dealer.

The real way to get variety is to have sufficient staging that you can cycle cars in and out of a session or to have a an operating plan  where cars have varying dwells or transit times.  If a car goes from staging yard A to the oil dealer it takes one session, but if the car comes from interchange B it takes 2 sessions.  Throw in a few variable dwell times at industry, and the cars will naturally mix themselves up.

New Book on The Subject

Check out Lance Mindheim's book on Operations.   Even though it's targeted towards smaller modern layouts the concepts are the same.

http://lancemindheim.com/news_and_notes.htm

Tony

Car Cards

There's nothing that says the waybill part has to permanently stay with a specific car. Why do you think the car card usually has "When empty return to" info on the card, behind where the waybill movement info would normally be covering it?  When a car reaches the end of it's movement cycle (in staging) you remove the waybill part. Then you come up with a system for how you choose which new waybills to pull for a new session, and then apply them to appropriate cars in staging.

Like Dave H. said, you also don't have to use all 4 sides of every waybill. You can just use two or three of the "sides" if necessary to get the required moves. 

Enjoyable Operations

That really depends on what is in that 20 feet. If it's just a straight mainline track, probably not. If on the other hand you have a couple of switching opportunities, and possible head on traffic to avoid, that 20 feet can be great fun.

When I'm finally able to close on the new house, the train room will be about the same size as yours. 12 feet by about 30 feet or so. I have several large industries I want to include, and there will be plenty of smaller spurs. As much as I want to put a lot of mainline track on the layout, that's really just to put distance between the working parts of the railroad, the industries.

As long as you have the chance to switch cars from place to place, 8 feet is plenty of room to have a good time. Just don't make the switching puzzles too hard, or your crews will get frustrated. Make some industries easy to switch, others can be harder. Variety helps make a railroad fun.

I will also be modeling a modern, freelanced road. Back story isn't really that important to operations. Operators don't usually care why the railroad is there, as long as they get to run trains. It will help you explain why things work the way they do, and it will also influence to a great degree the condition of the track, and what equipment gets run over it. The history doesn't have to be perfect, it just has to make enough sense to explain to those who might ask why.