Organizing operations

 As I am interested in having a few friends over for operating sessions in the future I thought it would be useful to start simulating some operating sessions to run by myself

I have always read that staging trains for an operating session can be a large chore.  Yes, moving many freight cars around to specific locations to stage everything takes a bit of time but what I was having a hard time figuring out was how to organize the flow of trains.  I have 3 staging yards and the idea is to be able to move trains from an occupied position in one yard to an unoccupied position in another yard.  My first step was to make track diagrams using the same graphics that I used for the staging yard's control panels and assign a number to each track.

Next I made up a magnet board from a piece of sheet metal I had laying around.  This was mounted to the bottom of the DC test setup that I keep on hand to test DC equipment.  Enlarged versions of the track diagrams were pasted to this.

The magnetic "trains" were made from sections of .040 x .125 styrene strip with labels pasted on them and small magnets on the back side.  The train symbol is printed twice, once in each direction so it can be easily read from both orientations. There are two of these for each train, the yellow ones are to trains that have not started their run and the blue ones are for the trains that have completed their run.  In some cases the same train is used once in each direction and when it arrives at the first destination, a yellow one with a different train symbol is placed in the new location.

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By running through the exercise on the magnet board, I was able to put together a job list showing where each train departs and arrives both in theory and actual location number.

From this list I have been running the 17 jobs listed in sequence by myself, fine tuning it as necessary.  Hope to have a few of the guys over sometime this summer to actually run the layout together.