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.