Current Docs

I made an Excel timetable planner.  It has two grids.  The upper one is the "timetable" and the lower one is the planning section.  There are two time buckets that contribute to a schedule.  One is the running time between stations (TD to TA) and the other is dwell (TA to TD).  For each train I enter a start time at origin and then the running time between each station and the dwell at each station.  The upper grid takes those values and calculates the times, the left side calculating down and the right side calculating up.  For each class of train I have some stock values.  If I want to move a time I can adjust either the running time or the dwell to move the times ahead or back to adjust meets.  When I have tweaked it, I copy and paste the upper grid values into a new page (pasting values only).  Then I format it to look like an actual timetable.  I can blank out the cells where times aren't needed because I pasted the values and not the fomulas.

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I add the other information and create the timetable (note the grid shot was from my previous layout so the times, train numbers and statins may not match).  I grey out the trains that won't run this session to make it easier for my operators.

I made a reset planner.  It recommends a number of waybills (a number between the min and max number of spots) to pull to bill cars between sessions.  I go through my staging yard and count how many of each type of car I will have to bill in each staging yard.  Then I pull bills to match the car types, and preferrably, the staging origins of the cars.  If I have 5 coal cars in B&O staging, I will pull bills so I get no more than 5 coal car bills out of the B&O.  As I pull bills I check off the the car types.  Unassigned cars become empty returns or overhead business.

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Then ther are the static ducuments, those that are made with Excel just because its handy to make forms with rows and columns:

Train orders :

Clearances : 

Train Registers: 

And turnover documents:

I may be cribbing some of this

I'm in the early stages of planning my TT&TO operations and some of your work may find its way onto my layout.  Thanks for sharing this.

Marc Simpson

Nice work

I'd been doing a lot of research on TT&TO operations (I even bought both the OpSIG books), only to later realize that my layout was simply way too small for most of it.

You can't have a timetable for a single-track extremely-rural narrow gauge short branch line that in real life only would have run a couple of trains a day (if that) had it actually existed. I model no through tracks as the concept is for an interchange with a 'main' to a fixed point at the end of the branch.

In real life, the RR I model had less than 34 miles of main line total and their timetable was ridiculously simple in 1943. They mainly went with train orders and switch lists, and that was the 'big' part of the line.

When I see paperwork like this, I feel the following:

1. Happy that I don't need to come up with all that
2. Sad that I can't us something like that once it was done

Thanks!

What a great summar of documents all in one place. Thanks!

Short short line

A short, short line would still have a timetable for passenger service.  People would need to know when to go to the station to get on the train and when they would get back and what connections they could make.  That applies whether the line is 10 miles long or 1000 miles long. 

Whether its "extremely" rural or "extremely" urban doesn't matter, it still hurts the same if something bumps into something else at speed.  What counts is the number of moves.  If you only have a couple moves then a scheduled train makes it easier since that eliminates the need for any movement orders.  If you have one freight train out and that train turns as one train back, you create two scheduled 3rd class trains with the "out" direction superior to the "in" direction, give it a clearance saying you have no orders, pat 'em on the butt and away they go. 

I ran my previous layout with scheduled trains rarely wrote any orders.  If somebody is a fan of less paperwork, having one timetable that can be used for multiple sessions and only needs a couple orders is way less paperwork than having many orders each session.

To each his own.  There are many ways to skin a cat.

Clearances

Just a word on the clearances shown, they are an archaic form used in my era but not common in more modern eras.  In my era a train got either orders or a clearance, but not both, except they could get a form X and orders.  Note that the old version of the clearance has no place to list the number of orders being delivered or the order numbers themselves.  It only says there are NO orders.  That is not consistent with newer rule books so check another version of a clearance. 

Form X became train order form V, register check of trains.  Several railroads incorporated both the modern listing of train orders delivered and the register check of trains in one clearance, in addition there was another form of clearance used in manual block territory, but that is so rarely modeled its moot.

Switch list

One other type of form is a switch list.  This type is common and used with minor variations by most railroads.  I made it back when I had a few engines that had a decoder number other than the engine number so that's why there is a decoder ID field: