Way bills and train folders

Way bills - Finally!

For a number of years I have been procrastinating about making way bills for my car cards.

I wanted to print them but could not find anything that worked or the way I was trying to do it in excel in terms of printing both sides and printing the writing upside down just was not working.

My hand writing is not great, so was determined to find a way. But had stalled at this point for a number of years.

Finally a month ago I found a video on youtube that had a link to the Älgoma Central in Ho scale web site (found here). This is a web page provided by Chris van der Heide.

This was a watershed moment. Fortunately Chris shared is excel sheets for both the 2 way and 4 way cards. As I already had all the card cards that I made many years ago, these way bills were perfect.

I already had plan as to the industries and types of cars and where some of the on layout industries could exchange cars. I just needed to make the way bills.

 

The next step was to adapt the excel sheet. Fortinately the excel sheet was made up of 2 pages. One page is effectively the data for the way bill and the other is the data placed in the pre-determined way bills.

From this I was about to print either single sided 2 way way bills or souble sided 4 way way bills.

I then found all the correct types of cars for the industires that I had previously set out on the layout and made up a few trains and instered the way bills into the car cards.

I then made up train folders for each train that contains the insturctions for the engineer and the car cards. It also holds the loco cards and caboose card.

Note the number on the black clip is in green. This is the lead loco number and the green shows that it is a sound loco. This saves the engineer from having to open the pack to find the lead loco number.

Non sound loco's have a different colour on the background of the number.

There are 10 trains staged in staging. All but 1 train has a lead loco wth sound. I have created other black clips with other loco numbers on them including others with and without sound.

I have also printed town / route maps and placed them at each town about the turnout control panel or near by.

At each town there are car card boxes that hold the cards for the cars in each town.

Next to staging there is trim card boxes for each staging track that hold the folder of car cards for each train.

Each industry, while the buildings are not finished and dont have names on them, I have printed out small cards to show the industry name to enable cars to be switched to the correct location.

I have also developed a plan as to what trains stop at what town to try and even out things.

Now that the car cards and way bills are down. I need to test out the process. Im sure the mix of cars will need to change as I may have too many on the layout, but time will tell.

Im very pleased with the way the waybills have come out. As I have kept the excel spread sheet, if I find any errors or need to change the routing etc, I can just reprint them and put them into the relevant car cards.

Now let the ops sessions begin!

AC installed

 Keeping it cooler

After a very warm summer and having issues with track warping etc, I decided to install a split sytem into the shed.

I have also reinstalled the skirts on the layout to clean up the room.

I will now continue to shake down the layout and fix any issues before a few impromptue sessions.

Signal installation

 Signals

The next step to getting the layout back to how it was in the old shed is to reinstall the signals.

I have reconfigured some of the driver boards and will use both TC64 and SE8C as I had before and eliminate the use of the LocoHDL and SRC16 boards for signals.

With this change, I had to build a few extra termination boards for the SE8C and TC64's

Then I was able to install the signals.

Due to changes in the layout, I need to make a few more double mast canterleaver signals.

All signals installed and working nicely.

Here are 2 wide shots of the isles. 

I dont have airconditioning in the shed and it has been a fairly hot summer. The layout has suffered a bit with some track warping. All is fixed now but the AC is now really needed as summer is not done yet.

Next step is to reinstall the skirts.

Lower staging installed

 Lower staging

I have now completed the addition to the lower staging by adding 6 extra tracks under Plattsburgh.

Here is the new staging

Here is the old staging

Next step is signal install.