PHOTOS BY TIMOTHY J. HORTON AND THE AUTHOR
Westbound Extra train No. 81 crosses the long bridge at the CPR’s 4th crossing of the Kettle River on the author’s N scale Co-
lumbia & Western Railway (above). Operator Larry Rice keeps one eye on his train as he fills in the register (right).
Adding timetable and train order control to the Columbia & Western: Pt. I
Modeling operations involves more than switching cars/Mark Dance; photos by Timothy Horton T
he N scale Columbia & Western was well along in its construction before I gave much thought to how the train movements would be “con- trolled.” I had spent a significant amount of time during the design phase studying my prototype and designing for what I understood model train opera- tions to be: establishing which trains would be modeled, their work and their make up to assure that there would be a variety of interesting jobs to run. I had thought long and hard about the human element of how many operators each session might accommodate, where they would be drawn from and their interac- tions as they operated the trains. I had even generated a string line diagram to assure that the layout could accommo- date the trains I wished to model in a
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2¹⁄₂ to 3 hour operating session. What I hadn’t done, until about a year before the target date for my first operating session, was put much dedicated thought to how cars would be forwarded and train movement controlled. I also had little practical experience in either area as I had only operated on three oth- er layouts to that point, each HO and each only once or twice. I was far more interested in designing and building my layout than operating other layouts and up to then I had equated operations pretty generically with switching cars. My presumption was that car forward- ing and train control could be added to the layout afterwards. So by waiting very late into the construction stage of the layout I sowed the seeds of two big problems, both of which I believe I can
report had happy endings. The first problem was car forward-
ing. In N scale the car numbers may be very hard to read making the use of waybills, car cards and switch lists problematic. I also am not a fan of car- rying car cards or waybills as I always seem to drop them or get them disor- ganized. The fewer things I carry dur- ing a session the better! There were two large N-scale layouts in Vancou- ver–Steve Stark’s Esquimalt & Nanaimo and Brian Morgan’s Selkirk Division–so I chose to adopt a modifi- cation of their Avery label technique to mark cars with their destination. I re- cently revamped this approach using small, easily removed tags coupled with a spread-sheet demand genera- tion system which meets all of my car
FEBRUARY 2014
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