How to setup and use Car Cards

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How to setup and use Car Cards
By Donboy

Car Cards is a paper system used to create a repeating simulation for the directions you would find on the waybill of a prototype railroad without the need to create a waybill document for each car movement. As you might expect a paper system has some variants and while I will explain the version I like the best in detail there are other ways to do it. In my case I see the equipment as a card that carries the waybill information in a pocket but you can have the waybill information carry the equipment information in a pocket or you can even have printed waybills where you write in the assigned equipment information. All methods work I just happen to like the method I am describing the best.

To get started you need to create a card for each item of rolling stock that you have. Back in the days when people painted their own equipment you could have unique equipment numbers. Now when we have higher quality factory paint you have the problem of duplicate equipment numbers. My solution to duplicate equipment numbers is to remove the factory numbers and decal in new numbers that are unique. You will have to decide on the solution for unique equipment numbers that works best for you.

I like to print my stuff using my computer so I was looking at 3 by 5 inch cards that fit in my printer for the base stock to use for my equipment cards. On of the problems with car cards is that they can be a pain to carry around so if you start with 3 by 5 cards you might want to cut them down a bit so the size is less of a problem. If you are cheap like I am you will try to use the 3 by 5 inch size cut in half to make 2 1/2 by 3 inch cards.

When I was shopping at the local office supply store I found some clear pockets that fit business cards. Seemed like it would be a good idea to use business card stock to print the waybills on and use the clear pockets to hold them on the equipment card. If you are using 3 by 5 cards cut in half then the business cards would also need to be cut down to fit. It seems like I use my paper cutter often so it must be a required hobby tool.

The idea of the waybill in the pocket is that you can have all destinations of the card on one waybill insert. You can have one destination on each side of the waybill and a return when empty on the equipment card. You can also use 4-way waybills by printing two waybill destinations on one side with the destinations upside down from each other like the example to the right. It is a good idea to use letters or numbers so you can tell when to rotate the waybill or turn it over for the next destination.

As you are creating your waybill cards you need to keep in mind that some of your waybills can have two destinations (one on each side) while other waybills can have four destinations (two on each side). If you want to print your destination don't overlook using labels and sticking them on the cards. The advantage of the inserted waybill on an equipment card is that you can have the when empty destination on the card car and removing the waybills means that you should not see any unwanted patterns in the way the cars move around the layout.

After you have created cards for all your equipment and waybills to insert them you still need to deal with how to handle all the cards. Many use carpenter aprons to carry the cards for the train they are running. You will need to have a place to store the cards close to the cars that are spotted on the layout. Normally you store the cards in a box attached to the fascia of the layout. You can use extra boxes to add more time for the cars to stay on spot. For example: one box for drop (car is left at the correct town), a second box for spot (car is placed at industry for load or unload) and the third box for pull (car is ready to leave industry and go to new destination).

You also need to have a place to sort the cards and a shelf added to the bottom of fascia is a good solution for that. Before I decided to go with a computerized system I was thinking it might be worth trying to use the locking rings (like you find in a notebook) that you can get at the office supply stores to bundle the cards by adding a hole to the equipment cards. You would need to get large rings so you could get the cards off without dropping them on the floor but it might work.

Putting Car Cards into Action

As you might expect there are several ways car cards are used and to make my task easier I will dwell on just one I like best.

It is an easy trap to start using your layout yards as storage locations because that is where you have the room for the most cars. Yards are not for storage they are really sorting machines and have to be largely empty to be effective at sorting so the goal is to keep the yards as empty as you can. The proper use of yards is the reason I think waybills should be added to equipment cards while the cars are in staging yards and for most equipment you would have them return to staging when the waybill was pulled at the last destination.

You can handle your traffic levels by how many waybills you make active in staging. Some handle the wallbill assignment during a session but I think it is a good idea to do it before the session starts. If you have a limited number of operators just added a limited number of waybills in staging and let some of the cars sit for that session. You can also have some traffic that would be very stable on the prototype so you could normally repeat those waybills in the same quantity and the same cars session after session (some people use one waybill for a block of cars in this case). For traffic that should go up and down in quantity from session to session you can change the amount of waybills by rolling dice or just selecting a random batch size. If you are adding waybills that are random you should also think about adding them to random cars of the correct type.

Basically that is it. Each car should have a card and those that have waybills have a destination so you make up some trains and move the cars and carry their cards to the directed location. Once you need to move cars to correct locations you will find that you will need to think a lot about what trains to run to get them there and the fun starts. You can fine tune things to meet your expectations as you gain more experience so start slow or it might be to much for a good time. Car cards are also fault tolerant. If you forget to move a car it can just be moved next session. If you move a car to the wrong location the card waybill still shows where the car should have been so the car can be moved to the correct location next session. About the only fun and games is when the car card is lost and you have a car without a card which of course can be fixed when the card is found. The fault tolerance of car cards is a big feature of the system because a computer system might require you to resolve and manually enter all cars that did not get moved as expected in the last session which is not that much fun.

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