I thought I’d take some “real life” examples from my operations sessions, post them up here and see if it’s popular enough to do on a semi-regular basis.
I model a narrow gauge that runs 2 trains a day. Once in the morning, another in the afternoon. There’s never a need to worry about fouling the main.
Train #1 goes from Green Springs to Lexington, with stops in Occoquan and Jackson. Train #2 does the reverse.
When I ran Sunday, Train #1 didn’t have much work to do in Jackson. Rather a surprise. And even Train #2 didn’t switch every location like it sometimes does. But, it was enough to make for a decent puzzle, especially since every industry spur is at capacity.
Here’s what Jackson looked like at the start of the session.
Left to right: That’s Buchanan Tool & Die with the 4 boxcars in front. You can barely see the Bucket Coaling station to the left of the tree/bush. Next we have Salmons Produce with a few visible reefers behind it.
In front of it, you see 4 tank cars that are just in front of the barely visible Mills Fuels. Finally, there are 4 boxcars on 2 sidings in front of Matheson Textiles.
This is a crude schematic of what it looks like (I sure wish there was a little program to do this more easily!):
The train is coming in to Jackson from Lexington on the left. At the bottom of the schematic, I have made a diagram of the 5 cars that make up the train at that point.
The BLUE labels indicate the industry, the GREEN labels indicate the track capacity. (The passing siding at the top can hold 7 cars.)
Here’s the switchlist for Jackson:
ALL set outs must be as close to the loading dock as possible - typically the end of each spur.
Have at it! There’s no time limit…
