Closing out 2015

The last couple of weeks have been pretty fun with Christmas, time with family and friends and time in the train room. Yesterday, Lisa and I took Nicholas, Adam and Angie to the Cincinnati Museum were we saw The Art of the Brick exhibit but also the year round Cincinnati train display, the seasonal holiday train as well as a look out Tower "A".

The display of Cincinnati is open year round

Quite the inspiration. I was looking at some of the details and determining how I could use the ideas on the PRR Irwin layout. Today, I spent some time tweaking some scenery in Herminie but spent the majority creating coal loads for the hopper cars. I have 4 or 5 cars that do not have coal loads which is confusing While in principal, I know how to do this - I've read enough articles - I've never done it before. Also, I am trying some materials from Michael's Arts & Crafts to simulate the coal in various sizes. As the glue is till drying, we'll have to wait until the New Year to see how things turn out.

The Holiday train exhibit is more toy train but very exciting to watch

Another task I finished today was creating a backup of the blog. While this website allows you to export and XML file of the content, there are no photos so I used a custom Lotus Notes database to log all the entries. Maybe I'll publish it in book for someday! Reviewing the entries, I started 2015 with the trains more-or-less running and very basic scenery. As I look to the New Year starting tomorrow, I have most buildings in place (although some are mockups), the two tunnel areas and about 70% of the basic scenery completed. There are now trees, bushes, people and cars bringing the scenes to life. And, of course, real operations based on a a published freight schedule. Not too bad.
Wonder what 2016 will bring?

Cables and Fast Clock

About a month ago, two of the Digitrax UP5 panels stopped working completely (under the P&LE Interchange in Herminie and under Vic's Bait & Tackle in Keystone Lake) and the infrared panel between these two was intermittent. Strangely, the other UP5 between these worked fine. This was a puzzle since the panels are daisy chained Uniontown -> Herminie -> Infrared -> E McKeesport -> Keystone. I checked all the cables to ensure they were tightly connected but still no luck.
Not sure if  I wrote it before, but  I created all the cables myself using a couple of telephone crimpers I had laying around. The challenge was the LocoNet cable is 6 wire and the crimpers were not that good. Still, I tested all the cables before installing and only used the ones that passed the test - meaning about 1/2 of what I made! I spent a week trying to figure out what went wrong and doing some research before I decided to buy the Digitrax LNCMK LocoNet Cable Maker Kit that comes with 50' of DCC tested cable and, more importantly, a good set of crimpers.
I ordered from DCC Train and it took a couple of weeks because it was on backorder. It came in right before Christmas but I did not get a chance to try it out until last night. I decided I would replace the cable between Uniontown and Herminie and see it that resolved the problem After I created the 3' long cable, I tested it and for the first time got all 4 lights solid green, instead of the flickering light or two on my original fabricated cables. Feeling good about this, I replaced the cable and now ALL of the panels are working again. YES! I plan to go back and replace all the wires with new ones.
Also yesteday, I remembered the that Digitrax throttles have the ability to set and display a fast clock. I was curious if I could run the schedule based on a fast clock and use that to build the time table. It worked really, really well and I may have to see about getting a Logic Rail Tech LocoNet Fast Clock to mount on the sky fascia above the peninsula.
Wonder if Bruce is ready to run trains on the clock?

Busy Christmas Season

It's very usual for me to be able to work on the layout or ran trains much before the holidays but this year has been a little different. Not only did I get a lot of basic scenery done around Uniontown and Herminie, but I was able to go through 3 complete cycles of the operating session. The weekend before Christmas, Bruce came over and the trains were running exceptionally well. Based on the feedback from the Car Card & Waybill group on Yahoo, we picked up where things were left off with the cars in the yard in between their destinations. All the other cars in the sidings and staging were flipped to the next step in the 4 cycles.

Herminie scenery extended past the company hoiuses

Things worked out rather well. All the "running" problems were due to open switches or other operator mistakes - so that is a good sign about the trackwork and condition of the locomotives and rolling stock. As the yardmaster and dispatcher, I mixed up the sequence of trains a couple of times and once annulled one train because it would have left the yard with no cars but it should have picked up loaded hoppers at the mine. Oh, well, the prototype did that at times as well.
I just finished up the 3rd session, running solo this time, and again the session seemed reasonably balanced at the end of the complete timetable. One of the staging trains was at capacity and I left one car bound for the P&LE in the Irwin Yard because the interchange was at capacity. Other than problems with a single engine - 8604 was stuttering and stopping so I pulled it off - accidentally running the wrong train sequence and a few open switches, everything ran well. I am learning some shortcuts and options to improve the session for the operators.

Uniontown scenery adds much needed depth

I got some great gifts from Lisa and the kids for the train and I have an interesting story about a DCC issue I encountered but I will save that for the next blog,

Operations Run Complete

Over the weekend, I ran a complete operating session based on the waybills. At the beginning of the session, there were only a few cars in the East and West yards but the WCC Mine tracks were near capacity, the P&LE interchange was at capacity and most of the sidings were full.The trains runs were very smooth with only a single car derailing and being sent to the RIP track. During the session, most of the 9 scheduled trains were of the expected lengths of about 5 to 9 cars. One or two ended up being 3 or 4 cars - REAL short even for my layout! But, by the end of the session, some of my fears were realized.

Irwin Yard at the end of the operating session

First, the Irwin Yard was nearly empty. Of course, there were about 5 cabin (caboose) cars on the cabin track - I have way too many on the layout. There were 3 or 4 cars waiting for the next session to be sent to the coal mine for loading but the real problem is the complete trains worth of cars waiting for a westbound train. Keep in mind, all the scheduled trains have run so these 6 cars would have to wait for PGH-81 Pittsburgh Transfer which does not happen until the middle of the session, meaning there would be even MORE cars stacked up here. Not sure if I should run an Extra between the sessions to help clear out this backlog or just let it go.
Second, the WCC Mine is woefully understaffed/ The mine tracks have capacity for 14 cars but by the end of the session, there were only 7 on the tracks. All the other hoppers are either outbound (east or west, there were no hoppers on the P&LE headed north) or spotted for unloading (at Dailey's Coal & Fuel). While I did not expect 14 empty hoppers parked here waiting for loads, I was disappointed at how few ended up here. Does this mean I need more hoppers or have to balance the waybills better?

WCC Mine and P&LE tracks have few cars

Finally, as you can see in the photo above, the P&LE interchange should have a few more cars. When the session started, there were 6-40' boxcars waiting for pickup and they were replaced with only 3 ore cars which are 1/2 as long - iron ore being much, much heavier than other commodities on the rails. So the net effect is a rather empty interchange.
I posted some thoughts and solicited help from the Yahoo Car Cards Operations Group (
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/CarCards/info) and they all suggested patience and run the complete 4-cycles before making adjustments. Brice will be over this weekend, so we'll work on the issues together and see what we come up with.
Did I mention the trains ran really well? Yeah, sort of proud of that!

Waybills, Part 2 (Updated)

Last night I completed 61 4-cycle waybills and since each waybill has 4 routes, this means 244 separate directions. Mind...is....numb. So, I created a XLS and listed each one so I could be sure my Actual waybills was close to the calculated number. I was dead on ... in a few cases.

A couple over or under is probably not too bad, but the staging areas (East, West, North) are a bit worrisome. I have DOUBLE the number of waybills for points West (Pittsburgh, Dayton, Cincinnati, Chicago, and St. Louis) that I need. Traffic jam!! What is pretty cool is that it appears most of the industries will be serviced pretty close to plan.
Guess I'll just have to run a cycle or two so I can see how to fix it.

Waybills

Now I am finally, finally read for the first, completely choreographed PRR Irwin...disaster. Let me explain.
In previous posts, I talked about using the car card & waybill (CC&WB) method for moving the rolling stock around the layout with a purpose. To do this, each card has a manila car card that lists information about the car (railroad, number, type, and description) and has a pocket to hold the waybill. I have had the card cards for a while and used them for the 5 or so times I ran trains on the Restway layout. The waybill shows where the car is going, where if came from, and what is loaded onboard (known as the lading), I used a few waybills on the Restway layout, but they were incomplete and pretty notional. In fact, I had to through about 1/2 of them away because the industries changed cities in a few cases on the new layout.

Sample waybills

The photo above shows some waybills. I have color coded them so my engineers can tell if the car is headed East (green for Greensburg), West (pinkish for Pittsburgh) or North on the P&LE (blue for ... a different color. How would you show North??). No highlight is an active industry on the layout. Note that each card has 4 different waybills which are cycled (flipped or turned over) between the operating sessions.
I found an article in the OpSIG's quarterly magazine, The Dispatcher's Office, that calculated the number of waybills based on the industries and track capacity. Also from the OpSIG, I downloaded an XLS database of industries from the 1950s that had rail service so the cars heading off the layout are routed to a real business. I only needed 210 waybills - or more than 50 different 4-cycle cards.

Bottom of the XLS to calculate waybills

So...I have the vast majority of the waybills written but I have not tested them yet. While it should work, it is very possible that I have 5 cars heading to a track spur that only holds 3. Or, too many empty hopper cars heading to the WCC Mine No. 4 in Herminie, or more cars headed to Pittsburgh, Greensburg, or the P&LE interchange than can fit on the track.
No one said this would be easy! I'll keep you posted.

Signs

Bruce's recent question of geography and where the Irwin district is located in the state of Pennsylvania also prompted me to improve the signs around the layout.Some time ago, I found an interesting little website (http://prr.railfan.net/cgi/makesign3.cgi?string=Greensburg&type=key) where you can create image files that look like the PRR station signs - with or without the keystone border. I created one of each kind for the towns on the layout and eventually decided to mount the non-keystone ones at each of the towns.

Irwin Yard with the sign between the throttles

Uniontown

East McKeesport

Herminie also got a sign but that side of the peninsula is a mess right now as I work on the scenery for the company houses so I did not take a picture.
Maybe next time.