ur club layout has a very simple arrangement – there is a central yard (Martin) in the middle, the staging at the far ends of the railroad (Cincinnati and Bound Brook). For almost two decades, six freight trains (three in each direction) would enter Martin Yard and swap out a handful of cars. These cars would go onto the three primary locals (Shelfton, Mingo Junction and Zanesville). When the cars got to the industry and spent a time being unloaded, they’d be sent back to the yard to go onto east and west trains. it was a nice little flow, simple to understand.

Ironically, just like the narrator of War of the Worlds who didn’t look up when the first of the Martian cylinders fell to Earth in plain view of his window, I watched the construction of a new branch line coming off Calypso Yard (a small unmanned yard located between Martin and Bound Brook). We put the yard in with the idea that maybe in ten years, we’d have a huge steel mill in operation and have to have a place to drop off cars to service it. Further, Calypso and Martin allowed us to deadhead cars back and forth, lengthening our trains over most of the layout and getting around the length limitations of staging in Cincinnati and Bound Brook.

So yes, off this yard was a neat little branch that climbed along the skyboard, allowing us to add a freight house and a large cement plant. Cool. But what to do with it?

First off, we can’t rely on anyone to run Calypso Yard. We are hard pressed to find a yardmaster for Martin and can’t rely on another person to sort Calypso. And trains can stop and work (briefly) in Calypso but we don’t want the engineers too involved – they want to swap and go. Really, the rule was one dropped string, one picked-up string, and back on the high iron.

So what to do with the stuff coming and going from Nazareth? We can’t expect trains to drop random cars for it – there isn’t anyone on the ground to do the switching a classification yard requires. Really, it’s hard to explain the headaches we faced with grafting a somewhat different freight flow into our already existing system.

So after a lot of thought, discussion and bickering, fellow ops-committee member Zach and I worked out the following. First, the cars from the two facilities would be shipped out in cuts, not individuals. That helps, since three cars of the same type and color are fairly easy to spot. Second, they would have destination (for the most part) utilizing the existing Martin-based turns. The freight house shipped to the Shelfton Interchange with the Tuscarora. The coal for making cement would go to the Zanesville Turn to drop at the Carbon Hill Mine. The outgoing bags of cement in boxcars we made into a wildcard to sorts, shipping it to six different possible destinations.

These “Nazareth Cuts” (as we call them) are shifted between the two yards, and are handled by the first trains of the night (202 and 223). There are other cars (wood cars off the Harris Glen Turn) that also transship by this method. And while this is kinda a wild card in our ops (everything else is staging->Martin->local->outbound), we can keep an eye on it by the distinguishable triplet of cars. It isn’t perfect (nobody besides Zach and myself know how this truly works – they just follow the waybills) but it’s good enough. Possibly we’ll come up with a different system later on.

This is the thing about ops. You’d like to keep it simple, but the larger the layout, the less simple it becomes.

And next, Zach and I need to figure how the steel mill will get 20+cars in and out a day – who’s going to haul them? How will they be routed?

Who knows?

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