Hi all,
Sunday was a restful day on the home front with time spent on the rail road working out some of the operation of car movement. With the arrivel of my newest engine (An Atlas RS-11 with DCC ) I now have a road worthy engine for the local freight shuttle to the different revenue customers on the layout. I normally move cars to and from my fiddle yard for now with the new RS-11 doing the duty on the local. It was fun trying to figure out the best way to move various loads to the different industries on my layout.
Operations is something new to me as I really didn't have much of an idea about running trains in my early years except to watch them loop the loop. Even with the imagination in high gear this gets rather boreing fast. So learning about operation can be a fun and ingrossing aspect of the hobby especially with the advent of DCC. So I spent the day suttling cars to the various industries on my layout. Well, maybe just a box to stand in for a industry on a lone siding but to the imagination it represented a future kit or scratch built creation. Running loops is fine for entertaining the grand kids but for this kid learning about operations on the MM&A is an eye opener on the design aspects of my layout. Now I have a reason to work the kinks and flaws out of the trackwork for soother more reliable operations.
That's it for now.
MPJOE
Operations versus running in circles
I too would like to learn more about operations. Up to now al I've done is run my trains in circles and that's what happened on my old layouts years ago. I wnt the new one to incorporate somew sort of operating scheme that makes sense.
Unfortunately the club I belong to doesn't do operations and I am leary of joining another one. From what one of the members of this has told me operations require lots of planning and since I've never done it before, I'd really need to learn the techniques involved from a pro.
I know some of what I need to know can be found by reading about what given prototype does but I'd have to adopt a given trackplan based on that prototype's track plan but fit to the amount space I have available. It can be done but I'd need help making it both look real and be workable as well.
So Iam reading about real railroads. In my case, it's Conrail, Amtrak and the other railroads which operate in the Connecticut, New York, New Jersey and parts of Pennsylvania. I haven't picked a specific area yet because I want to see which of those areas would be the most fun to duplicate in terms of scenery and customers served.
I like the modern era were big diesels run but I am not above putting nostalgic trains on my layout as fan trips to complicate things every so often. That's why I have a GG-1 in my plans.
But operations are definitely the way to go and I am also trying to find out as much as I can about them. As part of that I've been Watching Joe Fugate's videos on his Siskiyou Lines. That's an HO Scale layout but certain things can be used in all scales and all sorts of layouts.
Irv