Spokane & BC Railway Circa 1955

Modelling what might have been in southeast BC and northwest Wasington

Category: Operations

Operating sessions

VanRail 2019

The biennial model railway operations event known as VanRail was held here from September 6 to 8th. I hosted sessions on all three days, and we operated using the new train scheme developed over the summer following that “Fateful Friday” and the lessons learned. More information about the event itself can be found on the VanRail web site.

All in all, the three sessions went well from my perspective, and there were no complaints voiced. The amount of work seemed about right, with the one exception of the Morning Star mine turn, which had been a last minute addition.

Of course, on the last day, Paul suggested a great way to enhance the challenge of the mine turn, and he then proceeded to successfully prove how it would work. The idea was to send the train up with more cars than could easily be run around, but that would still fit on the mine spur, necessitating more switching moves. In the end it all worked out as he expected it to, so now we can operate that train with two levels of difficulty, depending on the experience level of the operator.

Some photos from Friday with Dave, Rick, and Cal…

Some from Saturday with Andrew, Glen, and Jim…

And some from Sunday with Don, Norm, and Paul…

I am looking forward to having more layout built before the next VanRail in 2021. There is lots of work to do, but I have a great crew helping me!

Second go at the new ops scheme

Hoping that the new operating scheme’s success last week was not a fluke, we decided to do it all over again on August 3rd, just to be sure, with VanRail only one month away.

If I may say so, I think it was one of the best operating sessions we have ever had on the layout. Lots of cars were in motion, even with 10 extra cars on the layout than before, but with no real tie-ups or confusion. The Grand Forks yard did what it was supposed to do, namely be a place to organize cars when a train is in town, and not be a big storage bucket all of the time. There was even space for two trains to meet and pass, because the siding was not clogged with cars.

Grand Forks yard working as expected and not clogged.
John switching Grand Forks – notice that the yard is not full.
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First operations under a new scheme

Following the “Fateful Friday” test operating session debacle, I did some deep thinking about how the layout should be operated now that Carson and Curlew had been added. I wrote a number of posts about the problems and what we should try instead:

After all of that, I designed a simplified train operating scheme without a dedicated switcher at Grand Forks. During the week, I ran numerous simulations to fine tune it until it seemed very workable.

The following Saturday, July 27, 2019, and still smarting from the previous session, my brave crew agreed to try out the new operating scheme. This meant that each train was just a way freight that switched its portion of the layout’s industries, with very little interchange of cars between the trains. I tried hard to keep the trains in different areas of the layout so that we would not have too many people in one place at the same time, and that seemed to work out pretty well.

Afterwards, everyone agreed that it was much more relaxed and enjoyable, even though there was still lots of work to be done switching all of the industries. What a difference from one week earlier where we had to abandon the session because it was just impossible to continue. Same guys, same layout, same number of trains, just a different approach to what the trains did. Thank you for not giving up after the previous week!

Thanks once again to John for capturing the day in photos and for his captions.

(Most of) The brave crew!
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Who Should Switch Grand Forks Industries?

The town of Grand Forks on the layout is based on the real Grand Forks located in southwest British Columbia. In its railroad heyday, it was served by three railroads, the Canadian Pacific, the Great Northern, and the Spokane & BC, which is the main focus of the layout.

The industries that are modelled on the layout are a mix of prototype ones and some “could have been” fictitious ones that never actually had rail service. The big question then is which railroad or railroads should switch the industries. There are multiple possibilities:

  1. Every railroad switches all industries.
  2. Each railroad only switches some of the industries exclusively.
  3. Only one railroad switches all of the industries.

In all cases cars would get interchanged between all three railroads at Grand Forks as necessary.

So, how to decide on which option to use? Option 1 provides the most “play value” for the operators, as the industries get switched by every train passing through town, however it is not very prototypical for most industries, especially small ones, as they tended to be located on only one railroad and served by that one exclusively. Some large plants had service from multiple railroads but they were the exception.

Options 2 and 3 are both very prototypical, depending on the siting of the industries, so either would be acceptable, so we need to consider other factors to decide in the case of Grand Forks.

On the layout as it currently stands, the towns of Grand Forks and Carson have trains from both railroads pass through them, while the towns of Curlew and Darestof see only S&BC trains. In order to balance the work load between crews, it would make sense to have the S&BC trains focus on Curlew and Darestof, leaving the CPR to service all of Grand Forks and Carson. This is Option 3. Later on, as more experience is gained, some of the Grand Forks industries could easily be changed to be serviced by just the S&BC trains.

What is the Best Fast Clock Multiplier?

Model railroads are often operated with a “fast clock” that runs some number of times faster than real time, in order to make travel times seem more realistic. Distances on most layouts are so short that the actual travel times between stations end up being very short. Running a clock at a faster rate increases these times to more acceptable values.

A typical fact clock ratio is somewhere around 4:1 or 6:1, as that makes a session lasting a few hours seem more like a day. But, what is the best ratio to use and why?

It is interesting to note that the actual ratio used has no real bearing on the operating session and when things happen, so long as the clock speed and the printed times in a timetable share the same rate. If it takes one real hour to switch a yard, then it does not matter if the stated time is four hours at 4:1 or six hours at 6:1, the work will still take a person one real hour to complete.

So, let’s examine some examples and how they relate between real minutes and scale minutes.

At 4:1, one real minute is four scale minutes, two becomes eight, and so on, with the scale minutes being in multiples of four minutes, e.g. 4, 8, 12, 16, 20, 24, 28, and so on. If we do the same for 6:1, we get 6, 12, 18, 24, 30, 36, 42, 48, etc. Now if we consider than most people think in terms of 5 minute intervals, e.g. 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 minutes, the scale times produced from both 4:1 and 6:1 do not map well onto the time intervals that people are familiar with.

If on the other hand we choose a ratio of 5:1, then it maps very cleanly at 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, etc.

So based on this analysis, it would seem that a fast clock ratio of 5:1 yields the cleanest times for operations.

Too Much Yard Switching Busy Work

The original scheme for handling cars through the Grand Forks yard was to classify all arriving cars using a local switcher, including those cars destined for the local industries at Grand Forks. A separate switching operation would then deliver them. This seemed to work well when there were only a few trains through the town each day, but with the recent additions of Carson and Curlew and their extra industries wanting more cars, this approach has broken down. More details of the first attempt at operating using that scheme can be found in the post “That Fateful Friday”. Suffice it to say that it did not go well due to the extra traffic to be handled through the Grand Forks yard. So, what to do instead? Time for some serious rethinking of the process, and a bit of detailed analysis.

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Operating Grand Forks as a Classification Yard is a Mistake

At the start of operations on the S&BC, there was very little main line track to other towns. The entire layout pretty much was the Grand Forks town, plus the upper and lower staging yards. This resulted in some traffic to and from the local industries in Grand Forks, but most of it simply was interchanged between the CPR and the S&BC and went to and from the staging yards. Consequently, it made sense to operate the yard as a classification point in order to best handle the interchange traffic.

Now, with the addition of the new towns of Carson and Curlew that have in combination more industry spots than the entire layout had before, continuing to operate Grand Forks as a classification yard is proving to be a big mistake.

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Selective Compression of Operations

The idea of selectively compressing aspects of a model railroad has been around for a long time, but it has mostly been applied to physical things such as building size, number of windows, bridge length, etc. The motivation is that our model railroad layouts are significantly smaller than the prototype.To help compensate for this, we reduce the size or number of various elements to help make the layout seem bigger. The notion that this same idea can be applied to the operational aspects of running a model railroad has not been popular, but it will be explored here.

Model train sizes and distances are already vastly smaller that on the prototype, so we often operate with a “fast clock” to enhance the notion of time and distance, but there are a few more things that we can do from a timing perspective to enhance layout operations.

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That Fateful Friday – or the first attempt at switching Grand Forks after the addition of Carson and Curlew

Following the construction and commissioning of the new towns of Carson and Curlew with their additional industries, a new operating scheme was developed to include service to these new towns. It was a simple extension of the one used to date, whereby trains from all four compass points would exchange cars in Grand Forks as well as service their assigned industries. The local industries at Grand Forks were switched also as part of the classification switcher duties at an appropriate point in time. This proved quite successful, and it was used during VanRail 2017 for two sessions.

With the significant increase in industries wanting cars, the classification role at Grand Forks was expected to become a full time position, leaving the local industries to be switched by a different job.

The Saturday gang bravely agreed to try out these ideas on one Friday evening that will be well remembered for all the wrong reasons. Let’s just say that my ideas didn’t quite work out as planned. If you are interested in the gory details of my analysis, it continues below the following pictures that were taken before everything went wrong.

John happily switching Darestof.
Ken and Colin trying to manage Grand Forks yard.
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New operations plan to include Curlew

This is a start of the new crew job descriptions for operating the layout with the addition of the new town of Curlew. The number of operating positions grows to fully four with the added number of industries to be switched at Curlew and at Carson.

A Bit of Philosophy

Grand Forks is a true interchange hub, as the S&BC runs north and south through it, the CPR runs east and west, and the GN comes in and back from the southeast. Lots of cars must be interchanged between trains at Grand Forks, which requires a dedicated switcher job to classify the incoming cars. There are also 6 industries in Grand Forks that need to be switched, plus the new adjacent town of Carson has a few more. As Carson is right on the US border, it did not make sense to switch it with a way freight that crosses the border, due to the paperwork involved. Instead, all deliveries and pickups at Carson are made by a turn out of Grand Forks that never crosses the border. Southbound cars leaving Carson will be brought back to Grand Forks and then sent south on the next scheduled way freight, after their customs papers have been drawn up.

The new town of Curlew is located between Carson and the original temporary end of the line at Darestof. It has only S&BC trains passing through it, and a number of industries that need to be switched. The initial ideas around how to switch Curlew were to parallel Grand Forks with a dedicated switcher that handles blocks of cars from the passing trains. This is really not a good approach as there is not enough work for a full time local switcher because there are no interchanges with other trains.

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