Keith Black

Eric,
 
Thank you for all that info....there is a lot going on.
 
I imagine the person (or office) that collected all the data to produce the Waybills was very important and crucial to smooth, efficient running of the railway. 
 
Some questions - How did that office communicate with other remote regional offices to know what deliveries to expect etc?  Or was there one central 'waybill office' per region?  Did Telegraph enable the first Waybill usage or were Waybills initially carried on the trains?
 
I think that a casual bystander like me only ever sees the tip of the iceberg regarding 'railways workings' - the same can be said of all professions I imagine.
 
So thank you for giving a very insightful look at what is happening below the surface. 
 
Richard

Eric, being new to this topic of how railroads actually run it's interesting reading as you peel the onion. 

Eric, being new to this topic of how railroads actually run it's interesting reading as you peel the onion. 

I did proceed with replacing the loops, elongated the dead eye holes as well. I have a couple of "masts" in place to hold them in place while I secure the pins and such.

Great to see this beautiful model in her home.
 
John

Eric, being new to this topic of how railroads actually run it's interesting reading as you peel the onion. 

That's pretty dang slick, Eric. Thank you for taking the time to explain the operations side of model railroading. 

Lovely looking work, Jacques. You could pin the the frames to the keel to give more support than the simple butt joint. 

Eric, being new to this topic of how railroads actually run it's interesting reading as you peel the onion. 

Looks like a super kit.

I suspect both

Me too.

Eric, being new to this topic of how railroads actually run it's interesting reading as you peel the onion. 

Lovely looking work, Jacques. You could pin the the frames to the keel to give more support than the simple butt joint. 

OK, last week I promised a different explanation of how that operating session worked, so here's a graphical approach. We start with the Rocheport track diagram. There's one siding (1) with five places for freight cars to be set out for loading or unloading. [1] is a team track used for unloading anything from coal to wagons to lumber. [2] serves the grain elevator. [3] is the depot's freight house. [4] and [5] serve the stockyard.

How do we know where to set out cars? Here are two examples of waybills. There's one per freight car, and they slide into a pocket on the car card so that you can only see the top half (we'll get to the bottom half later).

The first one tells us we have a car headed to Rocheport, on consignment to a wagon dealer named W.W. Scobbee (a real Rocheport dealer at the time). See that "1-1" after the receiver's name? That tells us the car needs to be delivered to Rocheport's siding (1), spot [1], as shown on the diagram above. That's because this dealer doesn't have his own trackside warehouse, just receives individual shipments now and then. So this needs to go to the team track, where this fellow can pick up his new wagon.
 
The second one tells us that this car has shipments for two different general merchandise dealers (again, real Rocheport businesses), and this one goes to spot [3] at the depot, which handles crated items like these (hand tools, canned groceries, clothes, whatever). 
 
Both cards also tell us that the cars came from St. Louis' Baden Yard, brought to nearby Franklin yard by a through freight, where they were sorted onto the local freight that brought them to Rocheport for final delivery. So what happens when it's time to pick up these cars? Between operating sessions, we flip the waybills over in their car card pockets.

Notice how the first ones had a big 1 in the upper right corner? That tells us this waybill brings the car onto the layout to its destination. When we flip these over, we get a 2, which tells us that now we're in the second part of this car's movement, sending it back off-layout to some other destination. For example, if we'd loaded an empty boxcar with grain at the elevator, it might be destined for a mill in Chicago or St. Louis. In the cards above, both cars delivered a product on their first run, so they're now empty (MTY) and are being sent back. The merchandise boxcar at the depot goes back to an MK&T freight house in St. Louis, and the empty flatcar goes back to a yard in St. Louis until needed for some other job. In both cases, the local freight takes these back to nearby Franklin yard, where an eastbound through freight will pick them up and take them to St. Louis.
 
So each waybill creates a realistic set of shipping/movement directions for each car on the layout, lasting for two operating sessions. Now let's summarize how this worked in practice.
 
Thinking back to the photo essay in an earlier post, here's how we started. The diagram below shows each car with its number and location or destination. Grey cars are being picked up, white ones are arriving on the local freight currently sitting on the main line. So 65-2 is car #65 currently in spot [2], while 25-2 is car #25 that needs to be placed at spot [2]. 74-T and 49-T are through cars going to a different town; here they're just in the way!

Notice that the arriving cars are all out of order; sometimes the Franklin Yard operator should deal with that, but today it's our problem. So the first order of business is to re-sort these cars into the proper order for delivery. Right now they're in order 3,1,5,4,2 but we need to end up with 1,2,3,4,5 on the siding.
 
Below, we've taken the caboose and the two through cars and stuck them up on the passing siding as out of the way as we can get them, since we don't need them here.

Then our locomotive does various sorting to get these in delivery order on the passing siding. Notice something odd? 

Why are they in order 4,5,1,2,3? Well, that's another fun operating quirk. Local railroad rules (e.g. mine) say you can't pull past the tunnel when switching here. So there's only room for the locomotive to pull three cars at a time past that left-hand switch just to the right of the bridge. So we placed the 4,5 cars first, so we can pull them past the switch, shove them into the far end of the siding first, then place 1,2,3 behind them. Just another part of the puzzle that makes operating interesting.
 
So now all we have to do is pull all the departing (grey) cars from the siding, in two pulses because of the length limit, and stick them on the main line. Then we're free to deliver 4,5 and then 1,2,3 into the siding. Then we just stick 74, 49, and the caboose back on the end of our outbound cars, and our train is ready to depart for the next town.

I hope that made sense. Please ask questions if not. This is a fairly simplistic version of operations; it can be made far more complex if desired. For example, a real railroad would do everything it could to avoid carrying empty cars. So instead of sending empty cars all the way back to St. Louis, it would be looking for a chance to send them somewhere closer to be re-loaded with something else. There are ways to simulate this more complex approach and I might implement those later, but for now this simple approach still makes for interesting railroading.
 
The beauty of this approach is that it's highly flexible and customizable. I can create as many waybills as I want, setting up different car movements for different reasons, and keep swapping them out. I could have a given car need to stay in Rocheport for several days, getting in the way! Not all sites have to have a car picked up or dropped off every day. And I could even swap out one waybill for another between sessions. And all this is for just one town; if the layout expands, the same situation happens in other places, and once you add a larger yard like Franklin, a lot more sorting happens when you're actually dealing with all cars passing over the railroad, not just ones for a little dinky town like this.
 
I realize this may seem esoteric to non-railroad-buffs. But think of it as a combination of historical re-enactment and mental/logic puzzle. Not only do you get to step back in time and experience live railroading in a given era, but you get a really fun mental challenge if you're the puzzle-solving type. My wife, who's a mild railfan, actually really enjoys these little operating sessions because she's a data scientist who gets easily drawn into logical puzzle solving. The railroad experience is just a bonus.
 
Thanks for reading (or skimming?) all that. Soonish I'll have more actual modeling to show, as I'm working on various buildings.
 
 
 
 

Simply beautiful Jacques 

I ultimately decided to add the normal frames now and the cant frames afterward. One challenge I've had with working out how to position the cant frames has been that the frames I was positioning them in relation to weren't fixed in place, so this will allow me to more easily set up ribbands to help position the cant frames.

 
I found the 3-2-1 blocks really useful for this. As seen below, I set up one to mark the edge of the frame, which ensured that the frame would be vertical. The other was used as a weight to clamp the frames while gluing.

 

 

 
I used the blocks to also hold Frame 1 at the proper angle. I couldn't really clamp this one, so I'm a bit concerned that it will be fragile.

 
In fact, the frame-keel joints are generally rather fragile, as there are no notches, just parts butted up against each other over a small area. I would like to add the two floor planks (or are they considered a keelson?) before I do much fairing, as they would significantly strengthen the structure, but I need to fair the interior, at least at the bottom of the hull, before I can add that. I've therefore added some temporary supports around the top of the frames, leaving the hull open for now (although I may add some temporary crossbeams before fairing the exterior). The frame tops aren't yet trimmed to their proper size, and the supports are made from scrap, so it's pretty ugly so far. Once they were added, my curiosity got the best of me, and I carefully removed the skeleton from the jig. The structure is fragile, but sturdy enough to be handled a bit. This model has been a keel and a pile of disconnected frames for so long, it was exciting to see and hold it as an actual 3-D structure!

 

 

 

 

 
I can see some areas I could have been more careful with in framing--some of the joints between floors and futtocks don't form as fair of a line as I would have liked. That said, Pâris described these vessels as having roughly-made frames, so I think it will be fine enough as long as the hull itself is fair. Clearly, I have a lot of fairing in my future. I've made some pine sanding blocks with different curves to better fair the interior.

 
My plan for the next steps is to put the hull back in the jig, fair the bottom of the hull interior, and add the two floor planks to better secure the frames. I'll then work out the cant frames, in part by running battens to make sure they're lined up properly. After that, I'll have the choice of either continuing to fair the interior and adding the stringers* to strengthen the hull, or doing the exterior first.
 
*As is often the case, I'm not totally sure about the proper terminology here. From what I can tell, a lengthwise strip of wood running across the interior of the frames is a deck clamp if it supports a deck, or a riser if it supports thwarts, and a stringer is a more generic term for such a part. On this build, it will support tiny decks fore and aft and a crossbeam that supports the mast, but nothing else, so I'm not sure whether it would be a clamp, a riser, or a stringer.

Welcome to this great forum!

The Vanguard fishing boats are a nice alternative. I'm working on the Ranger now (another Novice kit, but still challenging in other ways, including the addition of sails). It's a bit longer (and a little narrower) than the Sherbourne. I have the Erycina and Zulu, two other fishing boats, in my stash. The three fishing boats I don't have from Vanguard are somewhat smaller variants. I bought the Duchess, thinking it would be my second Vanguard model. But working on smaller less complicated models has allowed me to try different things and practice on different aspects of modeling. I have a model like the Harpy (and the newer ones from Vanguard coming out) on my wish list. The Grecian is probably what I'll do after the two other fishing boats. Just an alternative couple of options. 

This is the place to be!!  Good luck your adventure      
Bob  M.

Welcome aboard, mate !
 

Nice save on that, Mark, very neat work. I liked your idea of gluing those intricate pieces to a piece of scrap and your release method. Duly noted!

Hi Mark believe it or not the more PVA glue you use the better.  I find that a good layer of it rubberises much easier than a thin coat 

Thanks @Gregory  I was thinking about how I could replace the loops holding the dead eyes, I've made chainstays from scratch, that's not a problem.
So, yes, I think I will replace them.

Welcome!