An important part of operating the model Siskiyou Line realistically is the use of car cards.
Car cards are used to route cars on the Siskiyou Line. Each car on the layout has a card with a pocket. In the card's pocket, we can place a waybill respresenting a customer's order for goods to be transported. From the waybill, we can tell where the car is supposed to go.
Once we know where each car is supposed to go, we can make up trains just like the prototype. Below is a photo showing a sample car card.
From the waybill in this car card, we can tell the car contains a shipment of lumber going from Boise Cascade in Medford to Duke Timber in Chico, CA. Duke Timber is located on the Southern Pacific in Chico, so the car can go SP all the way and will not have to interchanged with any other railroad. The via line tells us to send the car to the SP main through Eugene.
With this information we know this car should travel in the Siskiyou Line East (MEEUY) train from Medford to Eugene. From there, hypothetically, the car would go on to Chico, CA. In actual practice on the model Siskiyou Line, the MEEUY runs out of Medord staging, across the length of the upper deck mainline, and then into Eugene staging.
Making Car Cards and Waybills
Making up car cards and waybills for a layout the size of the Siskiyou Line would be a monumental task were it not for computer software that is available to make the job easier. Many different packages are available, but the software I use is from Shenandoah Software. I am quite pleased with their software. With it I can print car cards and waybills on my printer, cut them out and they are ready to use.
The car cards are produced by Shenandoah Software's MiTrains program. The print dialog box from MiTrains is shown below. As you can see, you have the options you need to get the cards to print like you want them to.
As for waybills, I use Shenandoah Software's Waybill program. Perhaps one of the nicest features of the way bill program is it comes with a built-in industry database with thousands of industries and commodities listed. Below is the screen used to build a waybill.
