How I run my railroad

Okay, you've got your railroad running, and it looks great with all those sweet-running engines and cars. So now what next? Do you just run trains as and when you want, or maybe you want to run trains to some kind of timetable? How do you do that?

The main goal of this model railroad is realistic operation or, put another way, to have fun playing trains. But operation is a bit more than just running trains round in circles. Real railroads were built to move goods and people from A to B, hopefully for a profit. The aim is to run it like the prototype. This page will demonstrate how I am trying to achieve this.

There are many of ways of running a model railroad in a realistic manner. Over the years, modellers have invented many varied ways of operating their model railroads so that they give some purpose to the action. The system I use is the four cycle car card and waybill system. This is a system in which cards are used to route individual cars from place to place. Each one of my cars has one, and during an operating session I read the information on the cards to send the cars to the right industry, interchange or staging track as required. Because of the way it works, no two operating sessions are the same and it really makes running trains more fun. If you haven't tried it, I would give it a go.

The system I use is not the only one. You can choose a different system, or modify this one to make it as simple or as complex as you wish.

A typical car card: The waybill has been overridden by a "bad order". The next stop for this Great Northern box car is the RIP track for repairs.

The car cards and waybills I use are all generated in MS Word or MS Publisher.

Each waybill has to have as a minimum, a destination town. If the destination town is on the layout then it needs to also have an industry. This is the basic information required to handle the car. For my waybills I chose to add the originating and destination towns and industries. For cars destined to my layout I made up a list of the industries, what goods they would handle and what cars would be used. For off layout industries, I had a choice: make them up or do some research about real industries. Fortunately, someone has done the hard work of compiling a list of industries: http://www.opsig.org/industrydb/

For an idea of how all this looks in practice, here are some photos of an operating session.