What is the term in American railroading 4 pickup/delivery to/from customer sidings?

JonMyrlennBailey

Active member
What is the term in American railroading 4 pickup/delivery of freight cars to/from customer sidings?


In Trainz, what is the smart way of setting this operation up on a session time table without excessive use of track marks and/or commands?

The train will have to be cut at the correct spot on the line and the correct cars must be delivered to the right customers and parked in precise spots.
 
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It's called spotting. The customer's cars are spotted at the industry.

The number of track marks and commands depends upon the complexity of your route. If you have a lot of tracks to traverse, then you'll have a lot of markers, drive to, and navigate to or via commands.

There are a couple of commands that can be used to decouple a wagon or passenger car. One of them is uncouple at track mark, other is the uncouple command. The uncouple at track mark I think is easier to use because the other requires counting the number of wagons in the consist, starting with the locomotive being zero. (0).

Couple is required. Couple... chose the freight car. Depending upon the number of freight cars, this can be repeated multiple times. I've used this a number of times with success. I haven't used the uncouple commands often, perhaps once or twice ages ago so I don't remember the exact syntax.
 
What I have been doing is spotting on my layout with partial AI assistance. AI pulls the engines out of the roundhouse and hooks them up. The only thing I do manually is cut, hook and/or drop freight cars right at the customers locations. AI does the rest of the driving. AI just stops the train at track marks at the junctions for customer sidings right at the signals, one after the other. A 2-minute WAIT FOR follows each stop at customer junctions which gives me time to take manual control by selecting Stop Train. After the cutting operation, I select Continue Schedule and AI moves on. I use one time table to pickup cars in my fictitious RR district and another one to deliver new cars back to customers. One district run is pickup only and another is delivery only. AI situates local customer freight consists in my district yard. A pair of division locos from the staging area comes and picks up my consist in the yard that I collected for customer pickup and also delivers another consist at the same time on the same schedule. The imaginary division loco in staging just continually trades out consists for local customer service. What he leaves in my yard, I deliver back to my local customers. Basically, there's two district freight consists on the entire layout that repeated get switched out alternately. My local Stover Feed Mill alternately gets Illinois Grain Corporation and CN grain hoppers, for example. The division loco's time table is triggered by the Wait For Trigger command triggered by my SP GP9 Black Widow road switchers which do district spotting. The trigger is in the bay of the roundhouse where the road switchers are stored when out of service. Moving these engines in and out summons the division pickup/delivery train into its routine. Therefore, on the division train's time table there are two consecutive Wait for Trigger commands. The Black Widow hits this trigger once when pulling out of the roundhouse and again when returning to the roundhouse. The division train in staging therefore follows the district customer runs up automatically. On my layout is the fictitious Squatch County District of the fictitious state of Mondaho (Montana and Idaho). The predominately rural theme of the scenery is farming, lake boating, rivers, mountains, roiling green hills, recreational camping, drivable semi truck action, hunting, fishing, a dairy, ranching, small towns, logging and pine/hemlock forests of the American Pacific Northwest. I believe American railroad districts are parts of larger divisions or subdivisions.
 
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I do the same kind of switching myself. I think it's more "fun" than just mainline running and having the AI do everything because the AI act like a bunch of apes and start pulling levers and chains when they're not supposed to and screw up the works. There's nothing like initiating a runaround command and having the AI drive completely across the yard before coming back!

I also do a bit of bigger switching in my some of my yards. I have the AI mainline freights pull into the interchange yard. I then uncouple the locos from the consist, and then I have the AI ull the locomotives into the engine terminal. While the engines are off to the side, I use my own switcher to do the interchange work and then have the AI-controlled locomotives return and couple to the rearranged consist and continue on their journey.
 
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