Magnetic Waybills on the Model Railroad Club of New Jersey

My name is Dick Kunig and I'm involved in operations in the Model Railroad Club. You see here in front of you the components of the Magnetic Waybill System that we use for operations at the club. The waybills, as you can see here in the sample are constructed of the magnetic material and are color coded. A sample here on the Bellefonte control book shows, what the colors mean and how they work. Where there is a major color, which is the district that the car is going to, the minor color is the town and the center stripe is the industry to which the car is going to be routed.

Each town has a reference page that shows where the waybills indicate the cargoes, each siding, each industry, as color coded by the waybills. This helps new operators, who are not familiar with where the location of the industry is. Each car as we stated earlier is equipped with a magnet within the car to hold the waybill. We placed the waybills on the car as we use them. When we take them off, the last part of the Waybill System is an empty car and that's routed according to standard Railroad Practices.

The next thing is a single waybill placed on the car. This indicates the destination of that car to be delivered with a load. One variant on that, the first variant is that we will put two waybills on a car to indicate that it's going first to some place to pick up a load and then second to deliver the load to the second assigned industry. On these four cars, we see minor variations of the Waybilling System. The solid black waybill along with a white waybill, or red waybill, would indicate an interchange to one of our foreign roads.

In this case, the black one indicates an interchange at Hoboken. The green waybill would indicate a requisition from the Trenton Northern for a specific kind of car. And they will then waybill it when they get it. The waybill here with the number on the industry indicates a specific spot where that car has to be parked at the industry. And the last waybill we have here is if we have an operational situation where we have a bad order car, not a broken car in a modeling sense, but a bad order car in a railroad sense, we would put this Red Cross waybill on it to indicate that it's a bad order car.