A while back in a thread on operation on RM-Web the use of car cards and waybills came up, and that kicked off a thought process about how best to use them on an exhibition layout. Talking to the guys in the group and whilst some of us were okay moving given cars to an industry and then routing them back using just a bit of knowledge and concentration, others of us would benefit from something a bit more formal, we also have at least one guest operator at Exeter this summer who makes a very enthusiastic switch crew but probably doesn’t know an airslide from an autorack…so here goes…
Firstly – the templates (for MS Excel) I used are downloadable from Wolfgang Dudler’s rather nice Westport Terminal site, and have been modified from there to suit our needs, much credit to him for producing a nice easy to use template though.
http://www.westportterminal.de/wt.html
Apart from boxes/pockets on the layout to hold cards in-use, these are the main components of the system, each car in our switching pool (there’s not much point doing a card for a car in a through train that never gets switched) has a card, the cards show an image of the car, i’ve mostly harvested these from manufacturers websites where the car is basically just a RTR model, but one of the ones pictured uses a prototype picture and shots of the actual models are easily do-able for any custom models.
For each car working needed there is a waybill, rather than the usual “loose car” method each waybill assigns a specific car to a specific flow, for example the waybill in the lower right is for a flow of building supplies from Staging to American Hardware in RS Yard. When the car reaches it’s destination the card will get flipped to return it empty to staging for another load. This represents more modern practise where cars are more likely to be assigned to specific traffic flows than wandering “loose” about the system.
The waybill cards slot into the front of the car cards as per the corn syrup tank CCLX1150 – the waybill is held securely to it’s car card and the upper half is visible to the operators showing where it’s going and what it’s loaded with. The black stripe can be replaced by red to denote a Hazmat load with special handling characteristics.
The folder represents a “train”, just drop all the cars for a given train into the folder when it’s picked up and the train crew takes it with them…
So, my job now is to do 70-odd of these to cover the switching fleet for Exeter show!
We’ll be trying it out at the open house before Exeter as well, so if you’re at either of those please ask for more info. 
Filed under: General Info, Layout progress, Rolling stock, Shows
I downloaded Wolfgang’s package as well, but I’m having a devil of a time figuring out what goes where, data wise, and how to add photos. Maybe it’s my American English.
Any help with specifics would be appreciated.
Hiya Phil – yep I thought it was a little over-complicated as well, so I simplified ours – it’s modified a lot so actually remembering what we changed is a bit of a challenge at the moment!
In terms of photo’s, I ignored the separate photo’s tab and just inserted the photo’s in the normal way (insert, picture from file) and then re-sized the image to fit the box. The photo’s we have used are a mixture of manufacturers pics from their websites (Atlas and Athearn are both pretty good for this for example), digital shots of the actual model, or on a couple we have actually used prototype pics of the real car found on the likes of rrpicturearchives!
For the car card data I decided to just write data straight to the cards and ignore any other sheet. We also tweaked the info and other categories to suit our needs, for example I didn’t like just having the AAR designation LO for covered hoppers as that would end up treating a 2 bay cement car, a 3 bay grain hopper or a 4 bay plastic pellet hopper all the same for instance, so we have ignored the info on the bottom of the page and created our own categories of car – as we now have more categories than the original I now colour the top of the cards to match the car colour rather than colour coding them by type.
Don’t forget to use the same new categories on the waybills as well though.
When you print the car card page you get five cards to the page, at the bottom there is an extra white box, fold that forwards and up and wrap a bit of tape round it and that becomes the waybill pocket.
For the waybills, use the “waybill data” sheet to list out the destinations/industries on the waybills, at the top left of that page is a matrix in red which sends the info for the numbered waybill to the waybillfront and waybillback sheets to let them be printed double sided (i’ve modified that on mine as well as i’m only doing 2-part, single sided waybills) – so with the matrix if you wanted 12 of waybill number one put 1 in all 12 boxes and it will bounce the info across to the actual waybill sheets, print out double-sided and your sorted.