There’s an old article about operations over at the Model Railroader site entitled “The Brakeman on the Yellow Extra”. A nice narrative of operations, written back in 1973. Sometimes it sounds a bit more complex than it needs to be, but it is still inspirational.
You can reach it over at:
http://www.trains.com/Utilities/get_galleryfile.asp?idOLG={7D09727E-513D-481F-B6B5-87A6B70F48B8}1
It’s a PDF, so you might just want to right click on this link and save it somewhere.
You can also get to the main page from http://www.trains.com/Content/Dynamic/Articles/000/000/006/348trjyk.asp
From here you can also download the track plan if you want to “follow along”