Freight Oerations?

[boleyd]

My route is medium sized and currently has 5 trains running concurrently. I now want to add a 6th that will drop and collect boxcars from several towns on the route.What I do not know is the typical processes and arrangements for boxcar drops and pickups? Are their any general practices or is each customer a distinct business arrangement?

 

[JCitron]

This is one of those areas that varies between operators and customers.

From watching my local railroad and talking to the old road crew ages ago, the process goes as follows:

A through freight will stop in the yard and drop off a block of freight cars. This block may or may not be in the order to be distributed and it's up to the local switcher and crew to sort that out.

Once sorted, the freight is then delivered to the various customers. Some of the customers receive a regular delivery such as the perlite processor in the industrial park that got 100s of covered hoppers weekly while the warehouses nearby received a boxcar or two once a month. The brewery received a combination of the two along with some tanks for gases, hoppers for the barley and wheat, and boxcars full of bags of yeast. The bread bakery also received covered hoppers of flour and boxcars with yeast.

The way the drop offs were done varied between customers with many having trailing-leads off the main so that the freight could pull forward and drop the freight on the sidings. For the stub-ended industrial park branch, there was a runaround track part way down the branch so that the locomotive could go to the rear of the train to pull out the empties and put in the full cars.

If you want to see this in operation, watch some of the videos by Distant Signal. Distant Signal - YouTube. He did some videos on local operations where he's located in Florida.

My variation works like this on my Gloucester Terminal Electric route. This route is divided into three operations with two of them fully automated and me taking over the third. The AI drives the through freights and commuter trains along with the trolleys while I handle the local freight to the various customers. I have a number of freight cars in the Gloucester yard along with many of the same scattered throughout the route in various locations. In some areas, there are locally stationed switchers such as down on the docks and also at the granite quarry.

After gathering the necessary deliveries, whether they're empty or full, the "road freight" goes out on the line to deliver goods and pickup empties. The trip requires careful timing between the trolley runs since the trolleys run frequently early in the morning with a lull just about at noon, the freight makes his journey then. It so happens that it takes about 2 hours to ready the consist, so the timing is perfect for this. He'll take the loop down to the brewery where he exchanges with the Riverside Railroad. The R&R is a shortline that serves the brewery and a "stuff" manufacturer located on the line. This is a short switching operation on tracks that have seen better days.

The hand-off is done here with a bunch of boxcars, hoppers and tanks, and the same are picked up. The empties are placed at theend of the train while the ones for delivery are placed on the end. Once hooked up, the freight proceeds and has to cross the Western Avenue trolley branch. He runs a short distance down the line and take the dock branch where he does his delivery to the small yard there and picks up and drops off more. There's a switcher here to handle the actual docks, so there's no need to switch the docks himself. After his job there, he proceeds on his own tracks along the waterfront to the State Pier where he drops off and picks up some oil tanks and reefers. The reefers are generally filled with frozen fish and seafood going out and empty going in. Once delivered, he continues on home rails until he reaches a good-sized yard and more docks where he exchanges freight before heading to the end of the line. The switcher mentioned previously handles the switching here as well.

The quarry is handled by its own railroad that brings its loads down from the quarry to the stone processing plants. This is actually two different operations with one being a stone crushing plant associated with a cement and lime operations and the other for marble and granite blocks. The cement and lime products are sent out in covered hoppers and the blocks are loaded on flatcars. This is all brought down to the large dock yard where the loads are then brought back to be interchanged with the mainline.

Sometimes, I'll throw in a twist with the mainline freight will deliver or pickup freight cars. This involves me taking control and driving the freight into the branch where he drops off and exchanges cars at the wye before continuing on his way to his destinations. This switching operation can run up to eight-hours or more when the AI behaves which is most of the time. The action can get a bit hectic as I have to avoid the trolleys which have priority over my local freight. In case you're wondering, none of these interactive industries and it's all played out in my imagination. For open loads, I'll edit the consist and add in visible loads by editing the session in UDS. This is where the old consist access was great as Phil Skene and the others wish we still had.

In the end, it's up to you to work out the best way to handle your customers on your route just like the crew does in real life. Given that there are so many variations of this, you can pretty much do what you want.

 

[blueodessey]

Good Morning John,

Excellent information are Car Loading and Switching Operations. I'll stuff these Notes away in my Trainz Brain Book......:udrool:

Have a great day Sir.......:wave:

 

[boleyd]

Ok, fascinating. I have never met a "railroad person" so rumor and imagination are my drivers. I can see that I will be referring to the message a lot. Are the operations confined to one city/multiple sites, in terms of switching the arrived cars?

 

[JCitron]

Ok, fascinating. I have never met a "railroad person" so rumor and imagination are my drivers. I can see that I will be referring to the message a lot. Are the operations confined to one city/multiple sites, in terms of switching the arrived cars?

This was a regional operation done by the switcher LA-1, Lawrence, MA switcher. The crew visited Salem, NH, Methuen, MA, North Lawrence, South Lawrence Industrial Park, and Wilmington Jct. Industrial Park and online industries such as Gillette and some warehouses.

LA-1's companion switcher LA-2 went only as far north as Haverhill at the time, but now goes up to Portsmouth, NH after the Hampton branch was abandoned and there's no reason to station a switcher up there any longer. Places such as Haverhill and Portsmouth once had their own switchers, but the yards are nothing but a couple of sidings now. At one point, Bradford yard, across the river from Haverhill and only a couple of miles from Haverhill yard, had its own switcher which served the Haverhill Paperboard paper mill and other industries located on the former Georgetown Branch. All that's gone today; The branch and the yard and most of the small industries. The yard is now parking for the commuter rail and the branch is a rail trail. The industries switched to trucks after Guilford stopped servicing the paperboard company. That mill location is to become NIMBY condos, so you know what that means even if there was industry nearby.

As you can imagine, a lot more has changed since then besides the mill closing. Gillette, located down on the mainline near Wilmington Jct., discontinued its shaving cream operations after P&G bought them, so that service is lost. Back in the day, there were trainloads of tank cars going there. There are some lumber companies up on the Lowel line out of Wilmington Jct. as well as a Liquid Carbonic distributor who gets a couple of tanks on occasion, but the lumber is spotty. Market Basket warehouse is serviced by trucks now, thanks to Pan Am screwing with them. The former M&L is now a trail in parts, or a weeded over path in a dangerous part of Lawrence which means Salem is no longer serviced and Methuen is out of the picture. Guilford did this in 2001 when they left the line to rot. There was once a lumber yard and plastics company up in Salem, plus a steel mill in North Lawrence, and an industrial park in Methuen that got rail service. This didn't count Dodge's Agway in both Salem and North Lawrence, and some small plastics companies in the old mills in North Lawrence, or the bigger one, the famous Malden Mills who also got a few boxcars. The old branch was pretty busy on the south end, but all gone now.

I will say I learned a lot talking with these guys. The crew was friendly and were helpful when I asked questions. The RR policeman station in South Lawrence yard knew me and we talked a lot about what he found there. He brought me out on his rounds once, which was interesting. His biggest thing was chasing the hoodlums away at the time. There was little graffiti then which was nice, but the area was changing sadly for the worse with a shooting and break ins into some boxcars. When Alan Dustin, the president of the B&M, was visiting the operations, I was told to come by because they were hiring on. The road foreman liked me and my work ethic because of the way I asked questions. I never did because my own job sent me out on the road for a field service call. In some ways I regret it, but then again shortly after that, only a few years later, Guilford took over. When that happened, everything went you know where. There was a strike in 1985 that lasted 9-months after crews were cut and someone died. There was a ton of deferred maintenance, a la the Penn Central with freight cars toppling over in the yard, union busting management and operational changes, and lots of abandonments.

The thing is because the traffic is so varied and so are the customers, we can do what we want, and it'll still be plausible. We can keep operations going however we want and not worry about vandals, abandonments, and management.

 

[boleyd]

A very interesting treatment of the local rail systems. It is probably a saga retold several times around the USA. However, the perspective offers fuel for the imagination. It is yet another story of how a service was managed into the ground. Our system relies on the profit motive to guide management toward an efficient operation. But, they eventually succumb to the status of wealth. While government control stabilizes the decline of the roads, it brings the stagnation of bureaucracy. Will the decline ever be reversed or just slowed by subsidies?

I dislike shiny clean railroads. All my stuff is dirty. The shiny roads just remind me of "beneath the tree railroads". So I fit into current genre.

In the meantime, as a virtual benevolent baron, I have a lot to work with. Thank you for the several paths that can be merged into a more real (in my mind) operation.