My column in the new Model Railroad Hobbyist issue

 Once again, my roughly semi-annual column in the “Getting Real” series (several columnists alternating) appears in the new issue of Model Railroad Hobbyist. This time, my topic was “Crew Communications,” and it is included in the “Running Extra” part of the March 2022 MRH. (That part of MRH can be purchased as a single issue, or they are much cheaper per issue if you subscribe). Get the details from their website, www.mrhmag.com .

What I covered in this article was the communication that train crews would have had (in most cases) in the pre-computer era of railroading. By that I meant waybills, switch lists (if any), agent messages, management bulletins, and line-ups. Each of those topics has been covered in various of my blog posts, but this article brings all the material together, and doesn’t directly duplicate any of the posts. 

The article described the work that railroad personnel did with waybills, though not describing model waybills per se, as that topic has been covered in other articles. Of course, the waybill enables a switch crew to know which cars to switch, and what to do with them. Here’s an example from my layout town of Santa Rosalia, a loaded PFE reefer at Coastal Citrus, ready to be picked, en route to Albany, New York.

I gave links in the article to the various blog posts which can be regarded as background on specific topics such as Car Distributors, Car Service Rules, bill boxes, agent messages, line-ups, and timetables. The MRH presentation touches on these topics in less detail than what is in the blog posts, in an effort to give a “big picture” overview of how these kinds of communications can be modeled.

I included a number of photos in the article, showing prototype railroad employees doing their jobs, from agents to switchmen to conductors. Here is one of them, an interesting 1952 photo at SP’s Alameda Street Yard in Los Angeles. The switch foreman (left) and a switchman are deciding on the blocking of a freight train. The foreman holds some waybills, folded the long way, and the switchman is writing something, likely a switch list. Most employee photos in this era show men in fedoras.  (Richard Steinheimer, DeGolyer Library)

All these communication methods really reflect the various jobs people did switching on the railroad, which are the job experiences I want to try and reproduce in model form in my operating sessions.

It was an interesting process to pull this article together, as it touched on the whole range of prototype communications that I have researched over the years, so that I could provide them in model form to switch crews in my layout operating sessions. I have enjoyed learning about these topics, and have equally enjoyed figuring out how to represent them in model form, and then of course seeing them in use, helping my layout come alive in operating sessions.

Tony Thompson