Dear friends.

We were not satisfied with our railcar positioner no. 2 (see our topic “Consolidated nickel Mines).

So, we scrapped the first 2 versions of the positioner, and went into a model railroading frenzy, first at the drawing table and then at our workshop.

Our railcar positioner no. 3 is an operational wire-rope system, composed of three 3-foot sections. We intend to take it at model railroading shows, as a stand-alone exhibit, together with our layout.

Herewith the “core” section, after an operational test.

There's a number of different model rr software products out there to create car cards and waybills for your model railroad, or pre-printed forms like the ones you can get from Micro-Mark that you fill in by hand.

But they're fairly easy to make yourself with almost any spreadsheet software. I used Microsoft Excel since I happened to have it, but any other spreadsheet software will have the same or similar features.

I wrote up more details on how I print my own car cards and waybills on my personal blog. Read more here:

In order to have a certainly amount of variability in our traffic and simulate slight variations in customer demand so that some customers don't always get cars in a session, at our club we developed a basic spreadsheet using a random number generator function to come up with how many cars to order for different customers or car types.

I recently completed some revised track work and had the opportunity to operate my layout for the first time in months.  Since the track for this section is essentially complete I began to think about operations.  I've written complex paperwork programs in Excel, including a complete communication program that does everything from simulating switch operation paperwork to starting a diesel (by throwing every proper switch) to performing random inspections and other functions.  I wrote a phone app to simulate connecting an air hose and opening angle-cocks and one calle