FREIGHT OPERATIONS
Introduction to Waybill Operations
In real life, most railroad car shipments originate when a vendor or manufacturer contacts the local railroad to arrange shipment of his or her products to a specific customer to fill an order. Unlike shipping a carton of widgets with UPS or Fed-Ex, the seller usually has to take an extra step, which is to first schedule delivery of an empty rail car onto which the company's products can be loaded.
Once dispatched to the seller's siding, each rail car has its own waybill, which is a bit of paperwork that tells what is to loaded on board, how much it weighs and the final destination - the location of whomever has bought whatever is being shipped in or on the car. The waybill will stay with the rail car, handed off to each of the successive train conductors as the car moves from origin to destination. If the car moves across multiple railroads, each railroad will get a share of the revenue for this work.
Here is an example of a waybill that documents the movement of a snowplow from Bamford to Doaktown on the Canadian National railway.
In model railroading, the waybills have been condensed to a much more manageable size, with the information for one or more car movements reduced to the size of an index card. In fact, the most popular systems for waybill model operations reduce paperwork and maximize fun by facilitating capture of four movements on one mini-waybill. After each movement is completed, simply flip over the car to get directions for the next movement. Here are two example of pre-printed waybill cards made by model rail technology Boulder Engineering. The backs of these cards may have movements 3 and 4, if needed.
In this way the modeler can use a single multi-part waybill card to drive the movement of a shipment to various customer around the railroad, or to a point on the railroad that represents a delivery connection to the outside world - usually either an interchange with another railroad or a siding or dock at a harbor.
Note that the waybill has nothing to do with which actual rail car is used to ship the order! The "XM" on the examples above tell us that car needs to be a boxcar, but which exact boxcar the railroad sends is not specified.
Waybills on the TFRR
Planning the waybill operations for the TFRR will mean generating a card like the one shown above for each and every railcar movement to each business. The frequency of the cards in the "deck" of possible shipments will be illustrative of the amount of traffic generated by each business on the line in a given month, assuming 20 working days (Monday to Friday x four weeks) in each month.
For example, the Demorest Foundry and Machine Works can still be found across the now-grassy right of way from the Demorest depot.
We can make some assumptions about the shipments of supplies and finished products that would have likely come and gone from this little factory, as well as some guesses about the frequency of each, and what types of rail cars might be required:
Incoming: Bulk Steel - 4 cars per month (flat cars, gondolas and/or boxcars)
Outgoing: Finished Goods - 4 cars per month (gondolas and/or boxcars)
Incoming: Lumber for crates/packing - 1 car per month (flat and/or boxcars)
Incoming: Hardware, repair parts, lubricants and other supplies - 2 cars per month (boxcars)
Outgoing: Scrap/waste steel for recycling - 1 car per month (gondola)
So scattered throughout the "deck" of waybill cards for all the businesses on the line would be 12 movements that pertain to shipments that either begin or end at the Demorest Foundry.
At the beginning of the operating session the conductor would draw enough waybill cards to make up a train, then simply follow the delivery instructions found upon each. Some of these will be really simple, requiring only two of the four possible movements that will fit on one card:
1. Take an empty gondola to the foundry to pick up a load of scrap steel. The actual car may originate from the yard in Cornelia, or from another location on the line where an empty has become available.
2. The next time the train makes the run up the line (the next turn), take the now-filled gondola to Cornelia for hand-off to the Southern Ry., which is done by parking this car on the interchange track between the two railroads.
A slightly more complex waybill might be:
1. Take a boxcar loaded with plate steel from the interchange with the Southern in Cornelia to the foundry in Demorest.
2. On the next turn, take the boxcar - now filled with garden tools - to Reeves Hardware in Clayton.
3. On the next turn, take the empty boxcar back to the storage yard in Cornelia.
In this way the conductor can randomly generate interesting traffic all over the line by drawing waybill cards from the deck. The game can continue as long as s/he wants to continue drawing cards that drive additional trips up the railroad.
Freight Specials
In addition to serving the specific businesses that were found along the line, "special" waybill cards will create "one off" or special deliveries that help capture the flavor of short line railroading and/or the TFRR in particular. Examples could include:
* Delivery of a speedboat on a flat car to Lakemont for overland transport to Lake Rabun.
* Delivery of a circus train to one or more towns on the line, with a turn spent at each siding.
* Operation of a chicken car up and back down the line. According to the Foxfire book, this was a special stock car with small chambers for chickens that was used by a local poultry company to both buy and sell the birds trackside.
* Delivery of a tank car filled with liquid asphalt to Franklin for a town paving project.
* Delivery of a large piece of machinery on a flat car to the power plant along the Tallulah River.
* Pickup of special mini-unit trains devoted to seasonal agriculture, including apples, cabbage and cotton for delivery to the Southern Ry interchange in Cornelia.
* Etc etc etc!
PASSENGER & MAIL SERVICE
Passenger, mail and less-than-carload package delivery was conducted by the First Class trains on the Tallulah Falls RR's published schedules. Operation of the passenger train will likely be a more laconic affair than the freight operations, as the conductor and/or engineer need only travel with the train from town to town, pausing at each depot for a brief period of time - perhaps 30 seconds - to allow transfer of passenger and mail on and off the train.
A few opportunities for passenger specials exist, including:
* Operational of holiday/vacation passenger specials between Cornelia north to the tourist hotels at Tallulah Falls.
* Operation of "Game Day Express" trains moving from Franklin south to Cornelia for through service to Athens for UGA football.
* Operation of seasonal excursion trains up the length of the line, such as autumn "leaf" trains.
* Movement of the military train (troops and tanks) to the 7th Calvary Battalion's training depot in Franklin.
With the reduced need for operational knowledge of the line required by freight operations, operation of the passenger and mail train or one of the specials would likely be a good job for first-time visiting engineers/conductors.
ORNAMENTAL AUTOPILOT
The TFRR will also have the ability to run in complete autopilot for those times when we just want to watch the trains run while working or playing in the back yard. Two options will exist, including:
1. Trains looping around a relatively small circle of track around the big oak tree at the edge of the deck.
2. Self-directing out-and-back operation over the bulk of the line. Specifically, between two reversing loops - one that hinges off the oak tree circle and one that is disguised as the "Y" that was at Rabun Gap.
