Figure 8: The west Portland industrial area in the foreground with the Port of Portland area in the background. train crews operating on the high iron – they can be anywhere depending on the location of their train. MRH: Do you find that you need to schedule people as much as trains?
Figure 8 Text continued from page 88. a lot more cars on the railroad as well as a new switching job. As a bonus, crews working the Portland industrial switch job are out of everyone else’s way. The local’s crew picks up their train and paperwork in Portland, runs across the Steel Bridge, and doesn’t come back until the switching is done. MRH: How many other switching areas are there? Kent: Let’s see ... there are one, two, three, four, five other switching areas. Besides the Portland district, we have Walla Walla above (Walla Walla is the west Pasco industrial area served by the Ferry Turn, Valley Hauler, or the Pasco Local out of Pasco yard.
In Portland yard there are the East and West Portland areas with some industries handled by one of the two full-time switch crews in that yard. Also, the yard switchers work to get trains classified and switch out passenger train head-end cars. The coach yard is in East Portland along with the oil tracks, the REA Express, and a food company (figure 4). Seattle has a Tacoma industrial area with steel and paper companies, plus an oil distributor. West Seattle has a grain port, food company, team track, and two building supply companies. The building supply companies give us a lot of freight car variety. The team track in West Seattle has a novel feature I picked up from
Page 90 • Issue 11-10 • Oct 2011 • Kent Williams’ OWN&R layout, page 7
another friend. It has both aprons and docks on it and different cars need to be spotted at different places.
People management MRH: How many people do you put in the main train room during a session? How big is it? Kent: The main layout room is in a stall of a 2-car garage. There is 14” on the other side of the wall for Seattle and Tacoma. I’ve got about 250 square feet in the main room itself plus the 16’ Seattle yard. We regularly have six operators in here on a regular basis, plus two more out in Seattle and a dispatcher. That’s nine. Then there are three or four
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Kent: It gets a bit congested, usually at the beginning of an operating session, but then it tapers down later on. Train crews sometimes have to stand at the end of Portland yard with the yard crews telling them when to go forward or backward. That keeps them out of the space in front of the yard. There’s less crowding in Pasco, so crews can stand over there. It gets a little friendly in here once in a while, but the aisles are wide – about 4’ or 5’ wide even though the main area is only a 9 1/2’ wide room.
Color-coded waybills MRH: You’re using Car Cards and Waybills to route cars, but your waybills are very colorful. Are you using color coding to indicate destinations? Kent: We are using color coding for what we call ‘vias’. A ‘via’ is a place, on or off the railroad, where the cars are going. For instance, my Spokane staging yard handles all trains headed to the upper mid-west. Those waybills are
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