Outbound freight

20151002_frthse
The freight house with a number of outbound cars ready to pull.

On recent operating session blog posts, I’ve mainly covered freight car movements from the inbound yard to the freight house or team yard. For some recent sessions, I’ve been playing around a little with an online function to assist in the outbound freight car destinations. So far, it’s been working well.

 

Outbound Wheeling Freight Terminal freight car traffic has six basic destinations, each of which follows a B&O line out of the city and region.

  1. EB – Pit (Pittsburgh)
  2. EB – Gra (Grafton)
  3. EB – OR (Ohio River Sub)
  4. WB – Cle (Cleveland)
  5. WB – Col (Columbus)
  6. MT (empty to clean out track)

As part of the operating session layout prep, I had been trying to randomly pick a destination for each freight car when creating the outbound freight house and team yard inventories. After doing this for a year, I wondered if my efforts were truly random or if I was somehow too aware of balancing the car quantities for each destination. Here’s an example of the freight house outbound car inventory.

20151002_outbound_partial
The freight house outbound inventory. Note several cars have no destination, yet.

In setting up recent operating sessions, a random number generator has been employed for outbound assignments. This simple web function has eased the op session set up process.

When completing outbound destinations, I just use the online program to generate a random number between 1 and 6. The destinations are penciled onto the inventory with no worry about overloading a destination. So far, this system has worked well.

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4 thoughts on “Outbound freight”

  1. Hello Eric,
    I like this! You assigned a number (1 thru 6) to each of your destinations and then ask the website to generate a number between those for each car in the terminal?
    Shawn

    1. That is what I did, Shawn. I let a program assign the individual freight car destinations as the outbound inventory was created. This made the process pretty easy and my brain did not go into overload. – Eric

  2. There is another simple way of generating random numbers in the range of 1-6, and it doesn’t require a computer or internet access…

    1. Yes Pieter, but I do not have any dice in the house! It is a good suggestion that others should keep in mind. Thanks! – Eric

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