| The Third Shakedown | |
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Third Shakedown rolls well with the addition of more equiptment. August 1st, 2008 Thanks to Ralph and Tom the railroad had an additional twenty cars join the fleet for tonight shakedown. I had five crewmembers to operate the layout and we had just enough to get the job done with all schedule trains runing at 30th Street and three full carfloats at 28th Street being serviced it was a full night. |
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Session attended by:
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| The Shakedown Part III | |
Last Work Session just before Shakedown 3. July 30th, 2008 Well the last of the crew has gone home and I just finished updating the construction blog. Just one more day before Shakedown #3. I'm hoping that the layout performs well and that there will a smaller punch list at the end of August 1! I'm already looking at the end of September early October for shakedown 4 and the High Line's first run! |
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| The Second Shakedown. | |
Let The Trains Roll! June 20th, 2008 7:00 PM to 10:30 PM The Second Shake down started with Pizza for the early arrivers and plenty of railroad related activities. Rule G was not enforces and good time was had by all. The night saw three car floats and six trains in and out of 30th Street. There where some issues, including poor performance from the Proto 2000 S-1 (power pick up issues) and an Atlas S-1 (bad drive then a blown sound decoder). All in all a great night. |
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Session attended by:
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| Shakedown Part II! | |
The Night Before June 19th, 2008 Thursday night Neil and I staged the railroad for Friday’s second shakedown of 28th Street and 30th Street. There is one wrinkle in the plan and that is a dead frog on the Terminal Stores double crossover. I did not have the time to fix it before tomorrow night’s session. The issue only affects the North track and is workable for now. I have a quick and dirty solution to try tomorrow. After a week plus of cleaning, the room is in great shape. There have been a lot of changes since last time. First off we moved the ladder on 28th Street yard a fraction of an inch westwards so that now four cars can pass on the ladder. Phil Monat rebuilt the west end of the Terminal Stores switch so that now the cars flow much cleaner. All of the car cards have been replace with a newer design as well as all new waybills. New car card boxes where built and installed. The crew and I were able to correct most of the issues from the first shakedown. I have my fingers crossed and it’s until Friday night.
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Here is the AMCF-28E Carfloat from Pavonia ready to go |
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The time has come for the first shake down operating session of the New York Harbor Railroad. Well at least of the 28th Street Erie Carfloat yard. The car card system is still not ready and I am working on it as much as I can with out neglecting construction. The Date for the Operating session is February 16th, 2008 at 10:00 AM. |
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The First Shakedown! |
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Photo taken during the shake down on February 16th, 2008. Erie 308 in 28th Street Carfloat Yard Session attended by:
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| Developing the paper work to run the railroad! | |
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There are many ways to operate a model railroad. The method, for now, that the New York Harbor will use is a variant version of the Old Line Graphics car card and waybill system. Of course I have mad changes to incorporate the use of computers in the production of the cards. Using Adobe Acrobat and Microsoft office, I have re-invented the wheel. I did this since I do not have very large “trains” and the documentation (for inbound at least) is very detailed to spotting and location. I have made the paper work available for anyone to download and use for themselves. |
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Let’s start with the Carfloat form (Form OD 3884). This from was based on an Erie-Lackawanna document that was given to me by Tom Callan a few years back. He obtained it at a train show. I modified the document to fit the needs of my railroad and is seen here along side the original. This form is use to help the person assembling the float and the crew unloading the float. The cars destination and a spot time are on the card to help assess the time it takes to unload and spot a 14 car carfloat. |
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The next piece of paper work is the car card. This card is the paper representation of the actual car, hence car card. I prefer color coded card to differentiate between passenger, freight and non revenue cars. My color code is as follows: Gray = Freight, Blue = Mail or Passenger, Yellow = None Revenue (Locomotives, Caboose, and MOW etc.). For my shake down I needed to produce 107 car cards in two days and I wan NOT happy with the results. Neal Henning and I discussed the predicament and Neil suggested as the cars receive there Quality Control Assessments that the new corrected cars replace the older cars. Once again the car card is available for you to download and use! |
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The heart of the system is the waybill! The waybill for the older cars needed to be custom cut from a sheet of card stock. Since there will be a magnitude more waybills than car cards I wanted to use a standard Avery stock. I picked the standard ubiquitous business card as waybill stock. This dictated the size of the car card which I discussed earlier. Since I picked a stock that is designed for any home printer and is perforated for easy use I will be able to produce them faster and more detailed than before. A sample will be available soon. Also I can get the card stock in any color if I want to indicate hazardous materials or perishable freight from the normal cargo. |
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Page Last Updated: August 8, 2008
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