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Single day or multiple day operations inquiry
June 20, 2018
4:52 pm
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Joe-SVL
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Friends,

I finished my 5-th on-layout OP session last week and am now in the process of making trees etc as I want to complete the scenery in another major area of the layout. SO I've been thinkin'.  Ever since I did my first ProTrak paper session probably back on 2009 or earlier I have always run my simulations and 5 OP sessions on Mondays only.  Now that I have some real OP session experience I'm wondering about the feasibility of running possibly Monday thru Saturday.  I think all I need to do to do this is to assign car orders to Tues thru Sat and do something within the Daily Summary to tell ProTrak that I'm not running Monday's only.

On my layout I run

an AM and PM turn to front street - 9 customer SPOTs

an AM and PM turn up to Newberry - 6 customer SPOTs

a Milton interchange track turn with 3 customer SPOTs along the way

3 connecting trains up from and down to staging, and as neeeded

a transfer run between my main yard and a storage track

Underneath my single or multiple day inquiry is the fact that my Riverside yard is virtually full all of the time. So I'm wondering if by going to multiple days will that help relieve some of the congestion in Riverside?

I'm open to a fruitful discussion of the pros and cons of multiple day operations.

thanks

Joe

June 20, 2018
6:42 pm
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John V
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Joe,

While I have not been doing much recently with my RR, I have been using all days for quite some time.

I run the same trains each day (including Sunday).

My reason for moving from Monday only was to be able to have more car order / waybill variety without
overloading my relatively short industry tracks and preventing too many train capacity problems. Overall
I think I have been successful.

To switch to all days I think unchecking Monday only in the daily summary is all that is needed.
To skip Sundays after running the daily summary for Saturday's run, open Transportation -> Today's Operating Conditions
and the use the "Today is..." drop down to select Monday for your next session.

For reference, my daily lineup is:

Transfer run from storage to main yard.

Rachel Turn - out the branch line that is the focus of my layout.

First eastbound and westbound staging to staging through freights dropping and picking up cars at the main yard.

Single industry sawmill turn west of main yard, my least utilized train, often annulled.

Greeley Turn switching local industries east of main yard.

Second eastbound and westbound staging to staging through freights dropping and picking up cars at the main yard.

Transfer run from main yard to storage.

I also frequently run a job extra of the Rachel Turn since I am still moving more cars than can fit in the one train.

I am considering splitting the Rachel turn into 2 trains one that just goes to Rachel and a second that works the smaller
intermediate towns only.

Hope this helps,

John Valle

Freelanced GN Rachel Branch in '68

June 24, 2018
1:29 pm
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Fred
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Joe

I have been running every day except Sunday. The day off for common laborers in 1917. Everything works well. Scatter your car orders and waybills around throughout the week. Vary how often the sessions are that cars are called for. That should help with the yard congestion. All out and back. I run two scheduled trains from my main yard to staging, one train from the main yard to the river/standard gauge interchange yard and one train  from the branch line interchange, which is midway on the mainline, to the end of the line. Because of train length limitations, I run extras as needed. Hope this helps.

Fred

January 28, 2019
7:19 pm
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Joe-SVL
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HI, I hope all is well as we've gone a long while w/o any postings.  This posting is kinda a continuation of my multiday posting in the forum about WB balance.

I only got back to ProTrak the last 3 days as I spent a lot of time recently working on my first car for the NMRA AP Car Certificate.

Anyway I am still struggling with my multiday operations which in my 2nd iteration I now run all trains every day with varying car orders. The one parameter I kept watching is my L/E ratio.  In the 550+ paper sessions I ran before having my first on-layout OP session in 2016 the best I recall my L/E ratios stayed with 95/5 and 72/28.  So that was what I was watching as a parameter telling me whether things were going well or not. BUT over the holidays I was reading some printed out release notes from Jim and in the release notes for Ver. 352 he writes:

For example, suppose you have a customer who orders 5 car-loads every "day". Because a car ordered typically is empty the car must travel to the loading point (in staging?) then travel back to the customer. That total travel time is at least two "days" and if the railroad is large may be four or five days, or longer. Say four days. That means there will be, on average, "four-days times 5 car-loads" = 20 cars in transit on any one "day". However some cars in transit, because of the way trains interact, may get ahead (or behind) - and on any one day you may have 7 or 8 cars trying to occupy the space intended for those 5 cars. This is normal. But could be aggravating to those not familiar with your railroad. And with time the situation will smooth out.

On Saturday I thought I'd run one last set of paper sessions before I drop back to Monday-only operations. I've now run 21 sessions with Ver. 348 and my L/E  ratios range from 70/30 to 37/63.  Around paper session 15 +/- I had a head bonk moment which coupled with Jim note gave me the thought that maybe my L/E ratios were not meant to continue to be in my old  95/5 -- 72/28 range now that I am running every day of the week.  Does that sound reasonable to you out there.

BUT I am having a massive problem with every paper session of having between 16 and 49 of my 75 active cars listed as "MTY" with no WB assigned to them. Some of my connecting trains bring in the same MTY cars and then take them right back to staging.  Does anybody have any idea what I can do to clear this "problem".  I've never seen cars just ping-ponging in and out of staging.  There is an answer in Appendix L of the PTBM that talks a little about this and Jim said to look at the VOL. of the cars and make sure they the volume is large enuf to accept loads.  These are the same cars and car data I've been using for many many years and never saw this problem before.  All ideas are welcome.

Joe

January 30, 2019
2:19 pm
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Simon Fish
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Joe

 I am building up my layout details in the programme and running multi-day sessions on paper as I go along. I noted the same situation with cars ping-ponging in and out of staging and not doing anything. As with other comments in the posts I have waybills which only call for shipments once or twice a week so the cars have 'nothing to do', hence the ping-ponging.

 If I remember correctly Jim mentioned in a post somewhere that one way to reduce/solve the problem was to increase the number of shipments required/frequency and/or increase the number of offline shippers to increase the car usage. Depending on the car usage and train sizes it could also add to yard congestion down the line.

Hope this hepls.

 

Simon

January 30, 2019
5:15 pm
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Jim Brewer
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I would suggest adding some OV BOLs; make several for each car type and capacity. If ProTrak doesn't find a car-order for an on-line customer it is my understanding it then looks for an OV BOL. This will move the car.

Jim Brewer

On Wed, Jan 30, 2019 at 3:19 PM ProTrak.org wrote:

>

January 31, 2019
8:11 am
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Joe-SVL
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Jim B

Thanks for the suggestion  My understanding of OV traffic is that it is staging yard to staging yard traffic.  My SVL only has one staging yard so I've sorta thought (but open for correction) that OV traffic is not applicable on the SVL.  Is my perception/understanding correct?

Joe

January 31, 2019
8:26 am
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Joe-SVL
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Josh,

Thanks for the reply it's good to see some new names contributing to the forum.  Interestingly just a couple of day ago I completed an analysis, using my Monday-only ProTrak folder, of WBs wherein either the shipper or consignee were in staging. (My layout is small so things like this are fairly easy to do.). I found one staging yard track that had NO shippers.  So that sorta couples with your remembrance of Jim's comment which after reading your reply is fully understandable. What confuses me is that in general when I took my Monday only ProTrak folder and started into 7 days a week operations  I basically used the same waybills day-after-day with some variations. In my Monday only operations I never saw full trains of cars ping-ponging so it was a complete surprise to me to see it in my multiday operations. Right now I'm leaning on going back to Monday only operations with which I am very comfortable; but will be adding some WB-s for shippers from the staging track which had no shippers.

Joe (www.svl-rr.com)

January 31, 2019
8:35 am
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Joe-SVL
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CORRECTION

In my reply just above to Josh I mentioned that one of my staging tracks had no shippers.  Please change that to one of my staging tracks has no consignees.

Joe

January 31, 2019
1:23 pm
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Jim Brewer
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Joe,

You are correct..OV is staging to staging. You might try the active staging option, where cars are removed from the layout after a session for a period of time; I've never explored that part of the program.

Jim

On Thu, Jan 31, 2019 at 9:42 AM ProTrak.org wrote:

>

February 4, 2019
7:40 am
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earlyrail
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Active staging.

One problem with active staging is that if you start with x umber of drawers and then go to x-1, you et tose cars in the highest drawers stuck there.

 

Howard

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