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Notes on Operations
How Other Folks Do It
by Rick & Venita Lake
photos by Venita Lake |
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 In early March, we left St. Louis with its chilly weather
and our home plumbing problems to spend four busy days in
the San Jose/San Francisco area operating on several very
different model railroads as part of the second BayRails event. While we are both avid
operations fans, we don't get enough opportunities to
operate on different railroads at home and this was a chance
to see what others are doing and to visit with old friends.
Following are some of our observations on things we learned
about providing a great operating session for regulars and
especially for "boomers," or first-time guests. Many of them
have been or will be incorporated in our own home layout and
forthcoming operating sessions.
Plan an introductory session (about a half hour) to explain
the general scheme of the railroad and its methods of
operation to first-time guests. This should include
information on the railroad(s), whether prototypical or
freelanced, the kinds of traffic, available jobs, the
physical operating system and use of controllers (also
called cabs or throttles), use of switch lists or car cards,
dispatching, time tables, train orders, and anything else
unique to the layout. The BayRails website provided layout
descriptions with much of this information so that
participants could rank preferred layouts when they
registered. Most had links to owner's websites with photos
and after layout assignments were determined by the
committee, some owners sent additional advance information
to their assigned crews. Bill Kaufman even gave us a 15-minute PowerPoint presentation on the State Belt Railroad
before we started! (His article on modeling the State Belt
appears in the April 2007 issue of Railroad Model
Craftsman.)
 Identify, label, point out, and print out cities, towns, and
other important locations on the layout. A walk-around tour
helps beginners as well. A schematic drawing and a linear
diagram are both helpful. One layout simply laminated a list
of the towns in order to a small clipboard. Another small
layout put the basic track plan on a clipboard. This helps
to know how far ahead your next assignment, drop off or pick
up, is. The Silicon Valley Line, a very large freelanced
club layout, is not restricted by actual place names, so
they have opted to name their towns in alphabetical order
along the route, starting with Bakersfield at the south end
yards and ending with Windsor at the north. Provide basic
instructions for
each job. Some operators prefer certain types of jobs:
passenger trains, over the-road freights, yard switching,
dispatcher. With experienced operators, it may be best to
simply assign whichever train comes up next. Regardless,
instructions that give the train number, nickname if there
is one, engine and caboose numbers, engine DCC address, and
a brief summary of the assigned job will start the operator
off with confidence.
Give some consideration to how much the operator will have
to juggle and where he or she will be working.
Several layout owners provided shop aprons with pockets in
addition to the usual boxes for pencils and uncoupling
picks. If you are using radios and controllers, clip boards,
switch lists or car cards, special landing surfaces are
important or your precious trackwork and scenery may be the
only option. Pockets on the fascia for controllers are very
useful. Some owners use pieces of Velcro on the fascia and
the back of controllers and clip boards. One very elaborate layout had
just acquired multiple button telephones to contact the
dispatcher, a neat addition, but had not had time to install
all of them within easy reach. Since the phones were on the
floor, track warrants dictated by the dispatcher were
written down while sitting or squatting on the floor.
 Use the fascia for providing information to visitors and
operators as well as locating switch controls and indicator
lights. The Silicon Valley uses the fascia on the upper deck
to provide information and controls for the lower deck. It
is closer to eye level and buttons or toggles are less
likely to be accidentally hit. Color coding, green for lower
deck and purple for upper deck, and up and down arrows
helped in identification. Directional arrows for north/south or
east/west serve to remind operators of which direction they
are headed, important in determining who has the right of
way. On single deck layouts, powered turnout throws were
recessed in "portholes" on the fascia. Elsewhere, boxes for
car cards were installed into or under the bottom of the fascia so that
they did not project into the aisles.
Use switch lists to simplify car movements for the
engineer/conductor, especially for first-timers. Of the five
layouts we visited, none used car cards for the operators.
Some used switch lists generated by computer programs. Dave
Parks' Western Maryland used switch lists plus a dispatcher
who issued track warrants allowing the train to proceed to a
particular location on the line. Some were more concerned
about reporting location to the dispatcher than others, and
as dispatcher on one layout, Rick was especially interested
in knowing where all 17 operators were. That layout used
radios.
 On the three smaller layouts we worked, some of the jobs
were more isolated. Venita worked a yard on Jim Diaz's
railroad for most of the morning with almost no contact with
the other three operators. Jim Burgess's Yosemite Valley
uses switch lists and time tables with bold face type
indicating train meets like the prototype railroads do. It
operates on an 8-to-1 fast clock with the time displayed on
the NCE ProCab. Bill Kaufman has taken a cue from Chuck
Hitchcock and keeps his car cards at the clerk's desk,
writing up switch lists for the engineers/conductors as cars
are delivered from various destinations including the car
float. Even though these three layouts had only four
operators plus the owners, they were very enjoyable. You
don't need a huge layout to be able to have good operating
sessions.
While many of these notes describe things that modelers in
the Gateway Division are using, it was great fun to observe
others. It certainly gave each of us some ideas for
improving future operating sessions on the El and El. Both
of us feel much more confident about dispatching our own
railroad after BayRails and have a number of ideas to
adapt/implement to make El and El operations more fun for
everyone.
Oh, and one more thing — they had step stools or platforms
where needed.
Jack Burgess's Yosemite Valley's double deck fascias show
place names and local switch controls and provide controller
plug-ins and holders plus phones to contact the dispatcher.
The Silicon Valley dispatcher's desk and magnetic board with
a linear schematic and, on the left, a track diagram of each
level.
The Silicon Valley's upper deck fascia board has place
names, north/south direction indicators, and a track
schematic with lighted turnout controls.
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