Car Cards and Ops Session Staging on the Michigan Interstate

Ops Session Preparation on the MCIS

This evening I spent a couple of hours on Greg McComas' HO-scale Michigan Interstate.  Tomorrow is the first annual Fort Worth Layout Operations Day championed by Dean Ferris and the Michigan Interstate is one of the participating railroads with two operating sessions scheduled.

Alas, it was not in the cards for me to be able to participate tomorrow; however, I was able to assist with staging on the Michigan Interstate today.

After several operating sessions Greg decided to migrate to a card-card system to assist operators with the work events at Bay City Yard and On-Line.  He decided to use clear baseball card holders, each labeled on top for a specific railcar.  Printed destination cards slide into the clear holders completing the Car Card.  

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The destination cards have the two-letter station code in large, color-coded print.  For examples, cars destined for Port Huron have a red "PH" and cars destined for Bay City have a blue "BA".  The color coding will assist with visually identifying blocks of cars.

Under the letter code is additional information including secondary destination information such as industry name or track number, load/empty status and even Haz-Mat notation.  

We built several trains in Bay City yard, repaired several cars, filled and aligned the car cards, and then backed the trains into one of the two staging yards.  I expect the operators tomorrow will have an excellent time operating on the Michigan Interstate!  Be sure to check on the Michigan Interstate Blog button below for updates!

Michigan Interstate Blog

Chris