Mainline Mimicry

...or, how to pull off big-time ops on a small railroad.

A cut of cars await pick up by the eastbound time freight.

I've been playing a sort of operations game that lets me model a snippet of the bigger railroad picture.  My railroad was designed to be a model of a small industrial area served by a short-line railroad with tight curves, a few spurs and a siding that serves as a runaround track.  However, when I planned the track arrangement I included a full loop of track in order to just let trains run from time to time.

 The eastbound arrives and the conductor checks his manifest.

Also, while the industries I selected allow for a limited variety of rolling stock, there are still cars I wouldn't include in a typical operating session when running the railroad as designed.  Same goes for locomotives.  Typical power serving the 'park' is all smaller steam with short wheelbases. 

Lanky Mikado 480 backs down into the siding.

Recently I got the itch to run a longer train.  I pulled out the one and only brass engine I own (and only oil burner), a custom painted beefy 2-8-0.  [There's a whole 'nother blog post about this engine coming eventually...]  I hitched her up to a string of 9 cars and a matching caboose and let her run.  Add a cup of coffee (or something stronger) and a stool to sit on and I'm blissfully unaware, for a time, of all the world's calamities.  After I'd run that engine a few days, I selected 2-8-2 #480, typical power for the Christmas Tree train - again, not a loco you'd expect to see pushing cars down spurs in this setting.

 Three cars are heading east today.  The remaining car will go west.

This is fine for a while - longer than, really - but I wanted to plus the experience.  So, I imagined my 'long' train as a time freight hauling cuts of cars from division point to division point.  I imagined my solitary siding as a place to set out cars for a local to work later or perhaps a town switcher to shove around the local industries, and likewise, to be a place for that time freight to pick up a few cars to forward on to their next destination.

 With the pickups added to the train, the setouts are shoved into the siding.

The local crew will deliver these cars to their industries.

To make this pickup/setout game a bit more random, I chose to employ a simple generator - I flipped a coin.  First flip, heads = odd, tails = even.  Second flip, heads = 1 or 2, tails = 3 or 4.  This determines how many of the cars on the siding I pick up.  Since the siding only holds a max of 4 cars, once I subtract how many I'm taking I can flip again to determine how many I'm setting out as long as it is equal to or less than the number I just picked up.  I may take all 4 cars and only set out three.  Or, I may take one and leave one.  Depends on the flip.

 Their work complete, the crew heads back to the caboose while the engine pumps air into the train.

To complicate things further make things more interesting, I add one more flip to determine if I'm setting out cars from the front or rear of the train.  This shuffles the cars in the whole train, not just the first few behind the engine.  This is also a bit more true-to-life, as cuts of cars would be blocked for just such a set-out according to the order of towns the train passes through and may be anywhere in the train.  The conductor would know which ones were to be put where.

Two blasts on the whistle and it's time to roll.  This is a scheduled freight after all.

I'd love the room to build a railroad where I could model a division point yard, or a major terminal where big steam power is coupled to long trains, which then roll over a long mainline at high speed.  But that's just not possible at present, and I'm okay with that.  I can still have a little taste of that action in minature, so to speak, right here and now.