In Canada the Staples product # for the clear card holders is 46260.

I bet that the car float was it. I searched for a Hudson River RR assuming there might have been one handling interchanges, etc. but could not find one.

Very welcome!

It gets complicated and is part of the process of balancing car movements. As for timing that’s what you do between sessions.

Actually there is a freight depot in Monroe and there will be a C&O interchange track in Lynchburg. Only the moves to and from Richmond are imaginary. Once the 4cycles are complete you have 2 choices. First you can simply flip the waybill back to position 1 and do the same moves again. Since most layouts are only operated monthly it takes 4 months to complete a cycle and usually different operators do the runs so no one will remember the repeat moves. The second option is to have a box of waybills and after the cycle is completed you just insert a different waybill. The real trick is how domyou get the car from the Freight Depot in Monroe back to Gleco Mills at position 1 in the cycle? That requires an empty car oder form. These are also sold by Micro Mark and are printed on blue paper. They replicate a call from a company to a station agent requesting an empty car for a shipment. The agent would send that request to the nearest yard and the blue car request form would be inserted in the waybill pocket in from of the regular 4 cycle waybill to creat the movement of the empty boxcar in Monroe to Gleco Mills. Otherwise you would just have to use a different waybill that begins the cycle with a move from Monroe to a shipper. So there are two ways to do that too. It makes creating waybills something of an art form to make them seen reasonable and realistic. Another thing to remember is the “Return empty to “ line on the car card. That gives a more direct routing back to a yard to begin another cycle.

Some folks like Tony Koester revel in paperwork, others like you avoid it at all cost. I guess it comes down to how far you want to go to replicate prototype practices. I draw the line with car cards. I have seen the pitfalls of computer programs, having designed and sold a program called Switcher in the early 1990’s but abandoned it for operations.

I'm curious why you abandoned it, and is it still available anywhere?

At the time I was doing a monthly column for Model Railroading magazine evaluating computer programs for model railroading. Marketing my own software began to create a conflict of interest issue so I had to pick one or the other. So I arranged to hand my customers over to Albion Software, the company behind Ship It and went my merry way. I don’t even have a copy of the program any longer.

I asked because I've always thought the harder question was not how to program it, but instead what the software should do. I've seen the Ship-it site and their idea is to figure out raw materials and products for industries. My approach is to figure out rolling stock origins and destinations, but I'm concerned this will become too repetitive over time. I've operated my 5 sequence system for about 2 years now and don't think I've ever done any one of the train movements the same exact way twice, but I still wonder if I'll become so good at them I'll get bored. Even Ship-it says it makes non-random switch lists, implying repetition at some point.

@@donaldshroyer8633 you mentioned concern about repetition... (this is coming from a 10 year chicago and northwestern/union pacific switchman) on the real rr for all practical intents virtually all movements are repetitive, all those cars return back to the same place to get reloaded... over and over again... a lot of railcars out there are in some form of captive service... especially single commodity type cars like coal hoppers, automobile parts cars, automobile frame flats (those FTTX flat cars), plastic pellet hoppers, boxcars that carry newsprint or kraftliner, all those cars spend their entire time in captive service between the same shipper/receiver... i know for my layout i have a dead end industrial lead that has several firms on it... the only time i worry about any railcar/s is when they land in the yard, when they're staring me in the face (just like in real life LOL)... then i'm looking at my work order and figuring out how i'm gonna do todays work... my view is from the eyes of the yard foreman, as i did that in real life... any thoughts beyond that and i felt that i was taking on the roll of a yard clerk or worse customer service which was not my job... when i worked for the railroad as a yard foreman, i had a VERY limited ability to see what/when cars were going to land in the yard... only the folks in customer service had that ability... heck i had enough work just keeping up with what was in front of me for that day

Avery 76009. I ordered them off Amazon. Each sheet has 10 slots but when you cut them apart you get 6 complete car card sleeves since they share a common edge between them. Also if you use the MicroMark sets you need to trim the sides a hair to get them to slide in and out easily.

@@TheDCCGuy Great!' Thank you!

What is tibs?

I have 4 on the PS. Two are on the visible layout and 2 are staging yards-with one at each end. The staging yards allow me to stage almost all trains for a session. Only locals and interchange runs are handled in the visible yards.

There’s a scroll bar at the bottom of every video. You can use it to move past sections that don’t interest you, it’s that simple!