Car Forwarding on the 4th Subdivision - Part One: Overview

Willow Springs Bill Boxes

After prepping for part of a mini-presentation on car forwarding at the October Division 12 membership meeting, I realized that I have never really documented the car forwarding process used on my model railroad here. The entire car forwarding process includes both initial planning and actual implementation. This process is what I have used for the initial "fun for one" operations plan as well as what I will continue to use as I plan for a more involved operations plan as the layout expands in the attic.

Switch List and Mini-clipboard

My car forwarding consists of a series of steps, presented here in roughly the order I followed in developing the initial "U" shaped layout.  The proto-freelanced nature of the 4th subdivision of the Cascade Division of the Great Northern led to research of industries ranging from the real to the plausible. After researching to establish potential industries, the car flow was developed or organized using two charts, an online industry list and a matrix chart of daily car flow. Then, moving from planning to implementation, a car card and four cycle waybill system was set up for the initial rolling stock, and bill boxes were installed and labeled for all the tracks. Finally, I have found that switch lists are a helpful car forwarding tool in some steps of the sequence operations I wrote about in the last post.

Having established an overview in this post, I intend to go into more depth for each of the steps in a later second part.