switchlist and "situational modeling"

[steinjr]

The "randomness" is something very easy to create. Your "random" cars are selected by you (foreign railroad) which were ordered by "your customers" which need to be interchanged (given) to your railroad for you to deliver. The customers generate the traffic so be creative.

Yes, obviously you can create whatever variety you want when you pick which cars you want to move for the current operating session.

For myself, who is a lone wolf modeler, I for some reason feel that I want to have little bit of unpredictability in exactly what goes on the switching list when I set up an operating session.

It's not quite as fun (at least to me) to first deliberately decide how many Easter eggs to hide and where to hide them, and then go search for them

Judged from what Gary wrote, Gary seemingly feels something roughly along those lines too.

Obviously - if you generate switch lists for others, then for them it is generated in some way they don't know - they are just told what they need to get done that day.

Anyways - there is no doubt that switch lists as such are nice tools for the switching crew.

And I have seen modelers describe systems that were hybrids (mixes) of car cards/waybills and switch lists. They used waybills for car routing across the layout. Switch lists are concerned with the next immediate move, not where cars are eventually headed. Waybills and car cards work better for that aspect of model railroading.

But instead of taking the car cards out to the industries and leaving them in a box by the industry, the waybills were kept in "the yard clerk's office", and necessary information transcribed from the waybills to a switch list before the crew took their train out on the road.

When the crew came back in they handed in their annotated switch lists with moves checked off and notes made about events (bad ordered cars, extra re-spotting moves they had learned about when arriving at the industry and whatever). Then the yard clerk moved the car cards to the right boxes by his desk, so the car cards showed where the cars were (and what they were loaded with and where they were bound).

Lots of ways to do this. The important thing is to have fun :-)

Smile,
Stein