Last edited on Sat Oct 28th, 2006 01:17 am by Trebor

Green Valley District

Operations

I’ll use this diagram to describe the operations on the Green Valley District. Each letter represents a location or “industry” on the layout where cars are spotted.

Original operations

There are 22 locations marked A1 thru G3. The yard will hold 4 cars.

Cars on the layout are always at a specific location. Cars in the yard are never in any order.

At the start, there are 12 cars on the layout and 4 in the yard. The object is to pick up 4 cars and set out the 4 cars from the yard. In the beginning, I used a simple card system to randomly pick cars and locations. I’ll tell more about that later.

The runaround was designed to hold three 40ft cars and each end of the main line three 40 foot cars and a switcher. In reality, one on the cars can be 50 ft long. I use a variety of cars and switchers so depending on the rolling stock in use, you may or may not be able to fit that many cars in any one location. This adds to the complexity.

Revised Operations

Track C became part of the yard. The total number of cars in the yard is now 6. There is no set order to the cars in the yard. I now pick up 6 cars and set out 6. It generally takes 30 to 40 minutes.

Your turn.

I showed you how I’m currently operating the layout but now it’s your turn. Write out an operation plan and I’ll give it a try.

By the way, since everything is manual, I can operate from either side of the layout. That doesn’t really change anything but it might give you some different ideas.

Last edited on Sat Oct 28th, 2006 01:20 am by Trebor