Layout Cab ride

Layout Cab ride from North Staging around the layout to South staging



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Layout Shakedown

First layout Shakedown session

This week I invited the guys over to come and have a look at the progress of the build and to give the layout a run..

Overall the layout ran well. We had a few throttle issues where the throttle would pick up a different loco number randomly and render the loco that was being operated uncontrollable. This was unusual as it had not happened on the previous layout with all the same control systems and the same number of DCC components on the Loconet. Once the number of throttles (all DT400 or DT402D's) was reduced, as at one point I think we had 6 all running, then the issue seemed to go away. Odd...

Anyway, here are a few pictures of the session.
It is rather cozy in the railroad room with 7 of us. It will be a bit different when there is more switching happening and not just run through trains with no dispatcher.

John seemed to like to disappear into the staging / helix area. 

Here is a time lapse Video

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Waybills and more waybills

Time to get serious with an Ops session.

Per my last blog, we had another shake down of the layout last weekend.
The main change this time was to introduce car cards for each car on the layout. As most of the operators are familiar with the way they work there were no issues as long as the guys randomly drop off x number of cars and leave the relevant car card at the town where they left the car and also pick up the relevant car cards for the cars they added to the train.

Now the next step is to add way bills to each car to enable them to actually have a purpose for being on the railroad. This is a fairly large task as there are around 450 cars on the layout at present.

With the help of the guys that have been their before, namely, John Fahey, Rod Warren, Ron McFarlane, and Greg Johnstone, I have been researching and listening from the masters as to how to do this that meets the needs of the railroad, meets my needs and also best replicates the way we are all use to doing it on each others layouts.

The following web site has given me a number of ideas.
http://home.comcast.net/~prrndiv/ccandwb.html
This site has been very useful in terms of looking to determine the saturation of the layout in terms of cars on the layout. I think I will start with around 70% saturation and go from there.

Given Im going with 70% saturation and the layout is all but at 100 % now, I will need to remove about 90 cars from the layout before I start the next part.

See the following portions of my excel spread sheet that I have used to work out industry capacity, types of cars etc.

I intend to use mostly 4 way waybills for my cars, however there are a few block trains that wont switch any cars so they will simply be 2 way waybills to ensure that they get from North to South staging etc. Not to say that a car within these trains cant be given a bad order on one of the cars and made to drop the car at a town to enable it to be repaired.

The basic waybill will look like this and is double sided.

I plan to take the advice of the guys and just sit down with a pencil and a stack of waybills and slowly work through each car and determine where it has to go to and from and track them so I don't over load the system.

In the mean time, the guys found a few cars from the last session where I had mis typed the car number so those need to be fixed before I make way bills for them.

Follow along as I write 350 of these!...

Ops session on the D&H

Love it when a plan comes together!.

Well, today we had another basic ops session on the D&H.

Thanks to John Fahey, John Colliver, Rod Warren, Greg Johnstone, Bill Black, Peter Sutton, Jason Miller, Chris Elliot and David Richards to dropping in to help run the D&H and put it through its paces.

Today we ran a basic / modified time table and doubled up on most of the crew's. John C and Jason managed Whitehall Yard, while Greg looked after the North Creek turn. John F and Bill looked after the Saratoga Springs local while Rod and Peter did the honours on the Plattsburgh local.

Chris was only able to attend for a short time and looked after a through fright from the north to the south. As it was David's first visit, he mainly surveyed the scenes and had a good chin wag with the guys that he had not seen for a while.

Sometimes, half the fun of our sessions is to catch up with each other and have a good chin wag..

I managed to run the Montreal Limited north bound and the Adirondack south bound just to mix things up a bit to keep the engineers of the locals on their toes.

Im happy to say that the newly completed fascia was well received along with the shelves in each of the towns to enable car card sorting to be completed with out having to resort to placing cards on the layout (all be it ply wood junction at present).

There were 9 trains that did not make it out of staging due to the low numbers of engineers, but that's OK.. They will get a run next time.

I did not get a chance to take many pictures today, however here is one of Jason and John at Whitehall.

 As sometimes occurs when engineers are new to the railroad, errors occur and today was no exception. John and Bill had a minor mishap at Ft Edward with some attempt to cover up the evidence. Thankfully, all was resolved fairly quickly with minimal loss to running time table and the schedule..

Thanks again to all the guys that came today. I had a great day and the layout ran well even though it was 35 deg out side the shed. It started out cool in the shed however due to all the hot air being generated, it warmed up fairly quickly. Perhaps next time it wont be so hot!..

Now to go and make all the way bills and to modify the schedule to adjust when the locals come in and out of Whitehall.

Thanks again for checking in on the progress of the D&H Champlain division.

First basic Ops session on the D&H

Its all in the preparation!.

This coming weekend I have scheduled a ops session on the D&H.
The session is going to be a basic session with a full train time table but no car cards.

I have the car cards for each car in my fleet, however, I dont have the time needed to plan the flow of traffic. So, instead I have set up a time table and as each train moves around the railroad, they will have drop off and pick up towns pre defined and the engineers can randomly pick up and drop off cars up to the max 20 car limit for each given train.

I have created small cards for each industry in each town so that engineers can figure out what type of car may be required for each industry.

There will be a number of through freights plus a pair of passenger trains as well as the North and South local plus the North creek branch local. The locals will do most of the work in each of the 5 remote towns.

In terms of time table and supporting documentation, I have created a crew call sheet so each engineer knows when they are needed, a Whitehall main yard work sheet as well as train cards for each train to provide instructions to the engineers as to what they are to do.

Here are a few examples:

Crew call sheet

 

The graph showing the movement of each train and where they cross is 10 pages wide

Train cards

Whitehall main yard instruction sheet

Well, thats all the planing done.. How let see how things go on Saturday.

Open Day on the D&H

Time to put the D&H into service.

After a few months of hard work to get the layout to this stage, I decided it was time to have the guys around to put the D&H through its paces.

The shed door opened at around 12:30 and fairly soon after the guys started to arrive with throttle in hand.

Before long, and after a quick orientation of the layout, trains were running.
The staging tracks soon emptied and there were trains everywhere.. (all part of the plan!). This was a layout shakedown afterall.

With the long runs between towns and no dispatcher and no signals, the guys had to check ahead to ensure that there was a clear track. A few backup moves were needed on the odd occation and one or two trains ended up going through the staging bypass in order to clear the line into staging..

The layout ran very well with only a few minor issues, that, have now been diagnosed and partially resolved. (I found a few loco's with the wheel gauge set to narrow and were picking a particular point, and also a brand of low profile metal wheels and some cars were picking the curved turnout in Ft Edward, after some slight modifcation to the height of the point rails this will be resolved.)

Here are a few pictures from today.

A big thanks to the guys that came to help run the railroad today.. Im sure I wont have any trouble finding engineers to run trains when the town trackwork is completed.

Thanks to:
Rod Warren, John Fahey, John Colliver, Chris Elliott, Bill Black, Graeme Meyer, Ron McFarlane, Greg Johnstone, Noel Purdey, Dennis Hare, Barry Davies.

I had a great afternoon and it was a pleasure to host the afternoon and see the layout in operation and with the room full of people.

Im really pleased with the way the design came out and the isle widths seemed to work very well with plenty of room to pass by with 12 people in the room all at once.

Now to move a few of the turnout panels and split a few to make staging easier to operate..

Thanks for catching up on the progress of the layout build.