December Update

Merry Christmas to all my followers.

This month my has seen much work on my laptop whilst sitting in my armchair following a planning session with Wayne on setting up my holistic operating regime.  I did get to Wayne's for an ops session and Rob Paisley has a new website but that is about it....

Operating Regime

A little bit of history...  I have been manually preparing instruction sheets for each job in Word for every session since we commenced operations.  This usually takes about 10-16 hours as all car locations are logged, locos allocated and which trains will run decided - then the paperwork prepared including all car movements (switch lists) for each train....  I am hoping by implementing a holistic operating regime with about 100 trains in a cycle and the introduction of car card and waybill the overall effort for "A" session should be dramatically reduced. - That is the dream anyway, so what am I doing?  See below.

Wayne and I had a planning session and we made use of a white board - felt like being back at work....

I decided to develop an Access database to collect/store all the base data knowing that I could control data entry to valid ranges/values and then using queries create data sets for export to Excel for final manipulation.

The first task was to establish the trains list...

Then the train permanent storage locations - staging tracks

Routes

Well a track plan will help understand this along with a locations abbreviations list...

 Then we need to know the train direction/route change info

Then in each section what is the train doing?    and does it affect running time?

Looking at the list a few changes may be necessary as the fine tuning process is commenced.



Then finally we define the jobs which may be one movement (Train No.) or a combination of multiple movements.

Then Jobs the have Train No's assigned

 Putting it all together - below is the details for the Local Passenger

The next task was to calculate the running times for each of trains depending on type

Once again the local passenger was used as an example.

The far right column give the cumulative time since commencement for each train (3 trains in job) and each activity for each particular train is achieved.

I the New Year I will have a go at creating the train graphs using the 1066 lines of data produced to date.

Ops Session at Wayne's

We had our final ops session for 2017 at Wayne's.  It was an enjoyable session however one of our fellow operators had a medical incident which brought things to a premature end.  I am glad to report that following assessment at the local ED he was discharged late in the evening.

Afterwards we enjoyed a drink and we were treated to a freshly made pavlova.

Rob Paisley's Website

Rob has many good circuits and he has a new website the details of which I found on the Model Railroad Hobbyist Website - click the following link to visit Rob Paisley's new website.

If you forget this there are links on the main page of this blog and my website.





Thanks for all the support during 2017.

Till the end of January.....

-ooOOOoo-