A new bad-order card

Awhile back, I showed the interim bad-order slip I had created for use on my layout (you can see that slip in an earlier post of mine, which is at: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2011/04/waybills-6.html ). I say “interim” because I had always intended to find a more prototypical bad-order card, and substitute it when that became possible. Now it has happened.
     Luckily for me, it is a Southern Pacific bad-order card, printed on manila card stock. The original is 8 x 3.5 inches in size, and contains some interesting blanks for information to be filled out. (You can click on the image to enlarge it, if you wish.)

The red stripe makes it eye-catching in the prototype, and should do the same in model form.
     The back also has a bunch of interesting blanks to fill out:

I won’t use the back for my layout bad-order slip, but it’s interesting just the same.
     My concept here is, first, to reduce this to a size compatible with my freight car paperwork, which is handled in baseball-card-collector sleeves, 3.5 inches high. Second, I assume this slip in use will be inserted into the sleeve atop any waybill or Empty Car Bill that is current for that car. I went ahead and made some copies of the above image at 3.5 inches long and printed them out on a color laser printer at my local copy shop. Here is one of them, being inserted into a sleeve of a waybill.

     This worked fine, in that it fits neatly into the paperwork sleeve for the affected car, and has the same advantage as the prototype slip: it really gets your attention. One way to use this would be to direct crews to set out any car with such a slip, where it is out of the way, exactly as the prototype would have to do.
     I will be replacing my previous bad-order slips (a link to a description of them is in the first paragraph of the present post) with these red-stripe versions. I not only like the look, but they are in fact the prototype SP bad order cards, so they fit in perfectly for use on my layout.
Tony Thompson