Monday, December 30, 2019

Bad order cards

Some time back, I wrote a post about the Southern Pacific bad-order card I had discovered, of a 1950s vintage, perfect for my 1953 modeling era. As I described in that post, that card is now used on my layout. (You can find the post here: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2018/04/a-new-bad-order-card.html .)
     I had reference to this SP card in my previous post, about possible reasons for a through train to set out a car at my layout’s town of Shumala, such as a defect that would prevent the car continuing its movement. That post is at this link: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2019/12/waybills-part-67-through-trains.html .
     My attention has been called, however, to the fact that railroads today, and many railroads for years, instead employed two bad-order cards. One of them is for company-owned cars, and the other is for “foreign” or off-road cars. Recently I was given an example, a BNSF card with these two functions provided on opposite sides of the same card.
     What one might describe as the “home car” side of the card is a very definite red color, actually making the printed categories of defects a little hard to read (I have lightened the image a little to make it more clear, below). One can understand this level of detail as a help to the home shop workmen. You can click on the image to enlarge it if you like.


     Here is what the other side looks like, the side for the “off-line car,” with the very evident headline, “Home Shop,” indicating the destination for the carded car.


The diagonal pink stripe is a common accent for cards like this (though I have seen other colors); the old SP card I  mentioned in the paragraph at the top of the present post has a deep red stripe. The example of this card that I have was retrieved from a prototype car, and had been exposed to sunlight, so the pink stripe may originally have been a deeper color.
     I am now thinking I need to make up a bad-order slip for off-line or “foreign” cars, inspired by this BNSF example. I will show progress in a future post.
     I should mention, however, that in layout operating sessions I always emphasize to the visiting operators that if they encounter anything at all that is defective or doesn’t work right, to please let me know right away. Obviously, I can’t fix defects if I don’t know about them. I keep a sheet of paper handy during the session so I can write down any observed problems.
     So for operating sessions, the use of defect card for freight cars is perhaps superfluous (it’s obviously faster and easier for a visitor to simply tell me about a problem, rather than take the time to fill out a slip). But I like the Bad Order cards as a visual component of layout operations.
Tony Thompson

7 comments:

  1. But Tony, now your crews will have to decide if SP can make money repairing the foreign car or if it is a loser and gets routed home. When ACI RFID transponders were introduced, SP was actually making a profit installing as many of them as possible on foreign cars.

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  2. Good point. Now I will need to develop an economic model, specific of course to 1953, to account for this . . . though it's likely the bad-order car would have to go back to San Luis Obispo in any event, to reach a car shop.
    Thanks for the comment, which does raise interesting issues in some ways.
    Tony Thompson

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  3. In my experience, the larger the layout, the better it is to provide bad order slips for operators to fill out, because the owner may have too many demands on their time to hear about each issue with a particular car. I've had people use them to flag issues with bad track, too. And, having a clipboard, like you mentioned, is good too, because sometimes people will come right over and add to it while I'm distracted with something else. It all works! :)

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    Replies
    1. Having a stack of brass slow order signs would be an interesting addition. If a operating crew discovers a track defect, they stick a prototypical slow order. Than that also gives the owner a visual of where the problem is.

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    2. Nice idea, Craig! Track defects continue to affect an operating session and would be useful to call out, whereas a misbehaving freight car can be lifted off the layout and banished to the workbench, ending its impediment to the session.
      Tony Thompson

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  4. Here are two sides of a card that I found along the right of way at the Bakersfield Yard around the mid 1980s:

    https://james-harness.smugmug.com/Public/i-WBRMrvQ/A

    https://james-harness.smugmug.com/Public/i-K4zvs37/A

    Jim Harness

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  5. Thanks, Jim. This more modern SP card is a lot like the BNSF card I showed, in several respects. I am mulling over whether I want to modify my existing card to permit more detail in reporting defects, or whether to continue as before, which does work.
    Tony Thompson

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