Setting Up Your Model Railroad Operating System

How do you go about setting up an operating session? You guys are really getting into this. Did I strike a nerve here or something? You pull a lot of this stuff out. You run around, and I think sometimes our operator friends don't realize how much time it takes, and frustration sometimes. Well, we generally tend to wait till the last minute to get ready, that's part of the problem. But you use car cards. Yes, car cards and waybills, and we're getting to where we really like those. That's worked quite well. It takes a little time to get an operating session going. You have to turn all the trains. Now, we're running point-to-point, so we have to, some of them are turned on a Y. We back 'em out, and then we take the cards and go through the cards and flip 'em. We flip the cards over to the next destination. So that's been working out real well. The staging yards, the five staging yards play a key part in your operating session. You were alluding to this earlier, Wayne. How do they work, and you have an operating, I mean, you have a staging area for each line, is that how it's set up? Yes, yes, there's a staging yard. There's two staging yards for the Western Maryland, east and west ends. For the Western Maryland, and... The Pennsy, we have the one staging, and the trains come from the staging which would represent Harrisburg to Shomo Yard in Hagerstown, and they're broken down, and the N&W comes up from its own line, south to Hagerstown, and interchanges with the Pennsylvania. The Reading, you have the Reading. The Reading staging track also. Yeah, we have a single, it's a little bit complex. We have one single staging track in the Pennsy staging area for the Reading, representing the Rutherford end of their line, and also we stage it out of the Western Maryland. Cumbo is a very different staging yard. Why did you come up with the idea, Bill, scenicking it and putting a mirror so you can see it? Well, I think one thing followed... Oh, that was Wayne's idea? Well, we decided that was the only place we could put it. There just wasn't any room on the scenic layout to put this, and we wanted this yard for the sake of the operations. So we built it, and realized the operators couldn't see it, and because I'm not into elaborate electronics as a general rule, we decided, well, they're gonna have to see these trains to be able to stage 'em in and out.