Tab On Car update

We held the second dry over the past weekend and everything seemed to work out just fine.  We had one car picked up mistakenly, some of the Off Spots from the first session got tucked away this time and still had some that needed to be Off Spotted again this session.

Calion Lumber wound up only having one car to be dropped off.  If you recall, on the first run Calion Lumber didn't have any that were called for pickup.  There were already four cars filling the tracks and there were three cars that needed to off spotted there.  Since we didn't have enough room for one more car, the crew just picked up one of the cars that was sitting there from before the first run and the rest got shuffled around.

At Malvern, the W&OV crew wound up with a total of 5 or 6 cars that were slated as Off Spots and they were left sitting on the mainline between the engine house turnout and the East end siding turnout right next to the engine facility and Olin-Chlor.  If too many cars are Off Spotted at malvern, there should be plenty of space for these if the small siding next to the mainline at Haskell gets used, the one that leads to Ghuntz Ind.

I worked the yard at El Dorado this time.  Quin was right, the tabs made it very easy to shuffle cars around and not get lost by having to look between the cars and the switch list.

We didn't have any problems with mixing the Blue and Yellow tabs in with the White pick up tabs either.  Quin just reminded that ANYTHING with a tab at an industry gets picked up.  Once all the cars returned to El Dorado and got mixed in with the rest of them, it was easy to collect the Blue and Yellow tabs together so they could be segregated into their own group for ease of pulling from for the captive service cars next time.

So the decision has been made to keep the tabs!   

Now all I need to do is to work on adjusting the spreadsheet and the flow of cars and try to keep things somewhat even.

Modifying my tabs and labels

After the dry run of the Tab On Car system a few weeks ago, I encountered one problem.  When I was setting out the White Pool Track tabs for the captive service cars I ran out.  So I used the tabs for the cars final destination for that session.

Pool Track cars are captive service cars that do not go back to the main yard. These are the tank cars and pulpwood flats that run between the ICG junction at Ruston and Ohlin-Chlor and Crushmoore at Malvern. Then the open hoppers that originate at Gritty Gravel at Malvern and go to A&A cement at Dubach and back.  

Since they ran at such times that they would not catch the proper trains that could deliver them to their final destination for the current session, they would layover in the yard at El Dorado and will move on the next session.  So they were segregated onto a track in El Dorado that we called the Pool Track which kept them separate from the other through cars for easy sorting, hence the PT designation on the tabs.

What we came to realize, by that using the final destination tabs, the cars can now sit in El Dorado mixed in with the other through cars and are easily distinguishable to the El Dorado yard crew when they are sorting them.  So I asked Steven to make me a few tabs for these cars;

BLUE tabs for ICG & AAP

YELLOW tabs for OC, CP and GG2 

I also asked him to make some more NB and SB labels as well.

We'll see how this plays out on the next session.  The only confusion this will add to the road crews will be there are not JUST White tabs to pick up now, there will also be a few YELLOW and BLUE tabs to grab as well.  I think most of the guys know these cars are captive service and shouldn't have much trouble remembering this?  We'll see...

Now I need to get some kind of marking on the layout for the industries so we can easily match the tabs to them.