From what I read, C&O/B&O was based on Dispatcher.

Well in the sense that both are about trains.  C&O/B&O has both players competing for cargos and passengers - who can get them first and deliver them.  Each player has his line with common stations for pick up of cargos and passenger.

In Dispatcher, each player has his own section of the same railroad which he tries to run efficiently mainly getting the scheduled trains through on time and working in the extra freights.  The only interaction is handing off trains to the other player as they leave your district and enter his.

Paul

I will keep that in mind for the next time that I fiddle with the STS software. I did do some experimenting with colored QR codes and it seems as long as the contrast is high enough, the scanners can pick it out.

I use an application called "Free QR Scanner: Bar Code Scanner & QR Code Reader" on my Android devices and it works well with small QR codes. This app is activated as an alternate keyboard so it can scan QR and bar code information into any text box of any app on the mobile device. I can scan a 3/8" QR code from a distance of up to about 6 inches. I have a commercial scanner connected by USB cable to my PC that works from a farther distance. I'm still experimenting to see how small I can make the white border around the QR code and still have the scanner pick it out.

The STS software generates the waybills and switchlists for me that can also be viewed from mobile devices so a quick scan of the car displays all the necessary information.

I can't help but laugh at the earlier premise that if you aren't running as close to authentic ops to the real RRs, then you're clearly not doing it right, when i read the most recent posts here.

So, what real RR has giant cards/boards atop their cars with computer codes on them?

You can never have too much detail or too many trees on a layout.

And someone does not understand the concept of operations still

No matter what hobby you are involved with, there will always be someone to helpfully inform you that you are not doing it right.

If you are having fun, then you are doing it right! No matter how wrong you may be doing it!

(hell... doing it wrong is oft times the funnest way to do it? Have you ever seen Gomez Addams depressed while running his trains? No! The whole family seems to have fantastic joy when running trains! No matter how bloody the carnage!)

"If you are having fun, then you are doing it right! No matter how wrong you may be doing it!"

   I prefer to separate fun from correct technique and experience. One can enjoy striking out or clanking 3's off the rim or one can enjoy learning how to swing the bat  or score the ball  better...... Dave B

The idea of the railroad using giant computer code billboards was cooked up by the same advertising company that thought of the giant color-coded plastic I-Beams!

I don't remember saying anything about people doing things wrong. I was just pointing out that since I am in roughly the same situation as Mark Dance (excellent video by the way!) with multiple cars with the same reporting marks and the difficulty in reading car reporting marks, I found a way to solve the problem - a giant billboard on top of the car with reporting marks on it. The QR code is just an addition so that I don't have to type the reporting marks into the computer-based car forwarding system that I use. It solves the fat fingers problem.

Some folks don't like things attached to model train equipment that aren't there in real life. I think that except for those folks that have a 1:1 scale diesel locomotive running on steel rails spaced 4' 8 1/2" apart, everyone in this hobby has made some compromises at some point. The giant billboards are one of compromises that I have made. I'm willing to trade some visual aspects for ease of operation.

To bad some people do not have the ability to understand simple operations and can not get past or have no ability to focus logically, but get hung up on a basic routing system.  1:1 railroaded did some of the same things from chalk marks to a tack boards on cars with destinations.  Good to take one step out of the darkness and give operations a go than be all mousey and say it is too hard or beyond my understanding.  

I like the idea of ops. However, my layout does not lend itself to roundy-roundy nor to car card way bils nor to TTO or any of the myriad other "complicated" styles of ops. My layout is point to point industrial type switching; no room for staging yards, all trains are no more than 5-7 cars no caboose/waycar/crummies/guardscars or whatever else you may call them. When I operate with more than my self I allow a simple pick up and drop off of like cars, pick ups going to one of the three yards (each holds about 15 cars max). does not sound like much but keeps my interest and my operators busy for a couple of hours. I was using car cards and way bills but that got tedious filling them out and turning them etc. So now i have simple switch lists with destination yards and pick up industries. this seems to work for now. with minimum paperwork. Just my solution for a small layout without staging.

John Jackson

Detroit, Woodbridge and Birmingham Railroad

Great Lakes Division

In my quest to add info right to the cars for freight forwarding I struck upon the idea of adding chalk marks to the sides of my cars. This is easy to explain and no paper work is required of the operator. (I still decide which cars move but that is another story.)

First I got some magnets, sheet steel, and chalkboard paint. 

A favorite beverage is optional without violating Rule G. I glued a magnet to the inside of the freight car while the paint was drying. This let me add a small chalk board surface to the exterior.

The previous post sort of froze up on me so ... continuing. The Duco cement didn’t seem strong enough or I didn’t let it dry long enough so super glue to the rescue (ca). The correction pen was a big mess at 1:48 so today I sought out a white pencil but came home with these. 

While the Chalkboard paint worked ok the fine point art pen did a nice and legible job. You should be able to read P1 or Pier 1 on the side. The chalkboard paint did wipe right off so this would be handy for routing without removing the tab. So far so good. 

Michael has written about SwitchList and posted some examples of the output which I have been using as well to identify which cars are to be moved but, like I said before, that is another story. 

Let me know what you think. Too objectionable or distracting? Why bother when you have a switchlist and number 3470 is clearly painted in the side? Again, if you want to just move some cars or introduce some ops to the layout, this is fun and easy. 

"Too objectionable or distracting? Why bother when you have a switchlist and number 3470 is clearly painted in the side?"

  Would it be just as easy but less visually distracting to line up the magnetic tabs on a metal board in the correct order then shift them as the train is worked? Kind of a no paperwork switchlist?....DaveB 

@DaveB - clever. I actually painted both sides so I can just flip it over sending the loaded car to the mill. Once back to the pier I could reassign it with a new tab from the board. Since I am using a program to decide the movements the choices of cars needs to be more flexible - not hard to do. I honestly don’t have that many cars so they seem to be routed back and forth. Sorry me tweaking is necessary. 

Neil, I love those numberboards!  To me, they look very prototypical and railroady.  As you know, I'm mostly about having fun, and those look like a lot of fun.  

You're working in On30 right?  I'm wondering how easy it is to add/remove the metal sheets without derailing the cars?  Do you use a tweezers or some other tool?  And would it be just as easy in HO, do you think?  Also, how would you handle mounting them on a string of cars in a yard, say going to a local town?

Michael: Adding a magnet was easy in the box car. I have some smaller ones to try in the gondola by drilling a hole to drop it in the side and paint to match. Because the metal tab is painted as well it is easy to simply slide it off of the car but, yes, this is On30. That said, my 30’ boxcar is only 7-1/2” long so quite similar in size to an HO car but taller and slightly wider. 

Madding these to a string of cars shouldn’t be a problem. In fact I was looking at my HO tab example and wondering if a “chalk” mark could indicate both destinations as the multi-color tab can provide. Maybe a P/WS, for example, would send this car to and from the Pier and Wailea Sugar. (Pronounced Why-lay-ya. I don’t make these up!).

On a side note: the tab colors could also indicate the town and the industry, btw. Yellow is a he town and red the industry. 

My father sent me a set of non-metallic tweezers for Christmas when I mentioned I had been experimenting with these rare earth magnets. One of these may work well to add or remove the tab to cars. My latest project has been getting the port area ready to pull out of the layout (for lots of reasons). The idea was that it will be my main classification yard but is hard to reach and see. (This is getting off topic I guess.) In short, cuts will be pulled so that the conductor can see what is there, add a routing mark (tab) where necessary, and then sort the cars to an outbound track. Having a yard tail track right up front will help do this without reaching in, or over, cars. See? There was a point to this!

Railroads also put tags on the sides of a car so the switchmen would know where to route the cars.  A clerk would walk the track prior to switching the cut with a staple hammer and tack a route card to the side of the car.  On a steel car it went on the tack board (those little rectangular bumps on the side of a model car) and on a wood car they just tacked it to the side.

In 1980, in Galveston, TX, on the Galveston, Houston and Henderson RR (a jointly owned subsidiary of the MP and MKT that ran from Houston to Galveston, now the Galveston Sub),  a clerk would walk each inbound train and then staple a tan tag to each car that came in on a Katy train and staple a blue card to each car that came in on a MP train.  The cars would be switched and taken to the various industries on the island (or given to the Galveston Wharves RR)   When they came back the GH&H switched them by the different color tags into MP and MKT trains.

Thanks Dave. I’ve seen videos of the guys doing this and always wondered what was printed on those cards. The idea of a color card stapled to the side is appealing. Sounds like another project to try!

I use car routing tags, instead of waybills to route my cars. Here's some prototype examples ------

I'm assuming your cars are HO scale (sorry if I missed that) Also, did I miss how large you made your "tags"?

@Ralph - I may not have said but the one in the picture is about 3/8" x 1/2" wide (or less). This started when I tried to make QR codes at about 12mm square. That was about as small as I could go and still be able to scan the code with my cell phone.

Bear in mind that this is O scale so is still 18" x 24" for my "chalkboard" - pretty large but a compromise I can live with.

I figured it had to be a larger scale like O, it'd be WAYYYY too tiny to read in HO, without making the board a quarter of a half the side of a car!

As I mentioned, I use car cards that resemble car tags, measuring in at about twice the size of an OLG waybill.

Roundy round has worked for me for many years as far back as I can remember,  Roundy round gave me time to practice scenery techniques and hone my modeling scenery and structure skills while I enjoyed watching trains go by...eventually roundy round derailed and board the hell out of me, I then got hooked on switching ops while doing roundy round , in other words I kept the option open for roundy round for those lazy wanna watch a train go by nights...Now I am knocking on switching with realistic ops including  sound, dcc technology etc...thats the great thing about this hobby, it has the ability to evolve to the highest level that modern technology offers   and sometimes you can just go back in time into the  simplicity of roundy round and enjoy the hobby just the same. point is... who cares? enjoy the hobby  however you see fit, even if you change your mind.     

@Raph - I really like your modified waybills. My tabs are sheet steel sprayed with chalkboard paint and cut with kitchen scissors. The idea behind my posts is simply to point out that “Ops for the rest of us” need not be complicated or visually distracting. One does not need car cards or JMRI, or other programs that require a lot of we up or knowledge of industries and cargos, car types, etc. Just do what you want and add a tab to reflect the movement so it can be repeated. Soon all the cars that do not have an obvious destination will be choices while running a train around the layout. 

One thing that I have been saving for later is how to choose what car moves and what stays. This can be purely at the whim of the operator or randomized with dice. It can be based on an “unloading” period by industry that is often called a “hold” period or more complicated apps that can randomize the car forwarding or keep track of locations. With car cards one simply might shuffle the deck and draw two, or five, from the deck to deliver. If a car is already in that spot then it is replaced and routed back to the yard or interchange. 

Programs such as switchlist or JMRI ops can provide more organized place, hold, or pulls. Others may have written about this. If not, anyone?

I run my large N-scale '50 era CB&Q layout with a bunch of septa and octagenarians (I'm a septa, that's 70+ for those from Rio Linda) who couldn't read the car numbers and don't care to read complex instructions.  I use a train schedule and train instructions that read like 'Pick up 6 boxcars, 4 reefers and 12 cattle cars from the main yard, hook up a couple of engines and a caboose and take the train Westbound to Galesburg'.  I run the control panel and they run the trains.  We enjoy this and they ask for more. 

I got the idea for this method from an article by Tom Driscoll in the January 2012 edition of MRH.  It's worked great so far so I say 'Hats off to Tom Driscoll'.  Three out of four model railroaders can't be wrong. 

I just snarffed tea all over my keyboard!

I'm in the OPSIG and LDSIG and have gotten invaluable information from those groups.  It's just that as you get older, there's less enjoyment in that much detail for old retired guys that can't see very well and can't stand on their feet for extended periods of time.  I limit my sessions to less than two hours and that precludes doing those things that were easy years ago.  Pulling a specific car out of a string in a yard just takes too much time when any car of the type would do.  When I watched trains go by in the past, it was never any real kick to seeing that they were in exact order and could be easily dropped at their destination.  I can't see going to that and making things difficult when they don't need to be.  I and my friends worked for fifty years and that was about enough but that's just us.  God bless the kids that can still do that and get pleasure from it.  Just sayin'. 

I can't see going to that and making things difficult when they don't need to be. 

My personal feeling its that its harder to dig 4 cars to spot randomly spread theough a 15 car train, while its sitting on the main track, blocking other trains, than it is to get those 4 cars together in a yard (which is what a yard is specifically designed to do) and have them all together, easy to spot when it gets to a station.  If you use car cards, having the cars blocked means its easy to to find the cards for for the cars for that station, and you don't have to go fiddling through an entire deck to find the cards you need.  But that's just me.

Below is the sum and total of paperwork generated for a train. I use JMRI Ops to generate the manifest in csv format, use Libre Office Calc to get the info I want, takes 1 minute per switch list, then print. The cars listed at a industry but not showing destinations are holds. BK1 and 2 are yard tracks in Bakersfield where the train originates and terminates. 

Clark Bauman

CR&B Railroad

Here's an example of a switchlist and a waybill that the new version of STS can generate. It can optionally display user-defined colors for car destinations so that trains can be blocked using color codes. For users of car card systems, it can print a small colored triangle in the top left corner of two-destination waybills that can aid in blocking cars as well. The switchlist is half of an 8"X11" sheet of paper that can be folded lengthwise. The other half has instructions for the crew. The waybill (one empty movement, one loaded movement) is also designed to be folded in half so it can fit into the standard car card pocket.

(The station names may seem rather cryptic. I use the actual CNW station numbers and then abbreviations of the town names as station names. That way the system keeps the stations in order from east to west in various reports. This is just my choice and not a requirement of the software.)