There you go! I did basically the same thing with my kiddo and his SHS stuff on the floor when he was much younger--make car cards and shuffle them.
Charles Weston San Antonio ________________________________ From: Peter Vanvliet <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Saturday, July 20, 2013 3:22 PM Subject: {S-Scale List} Simple Layout Operations For my small switching layout I am starting to build some structures to go along the spurs I have. However, in the meantime I occasionally do some simple switching; just moving cars from one spot to another. I thought about buying a railroad-operations software application, but so far all the ones I have seen or tried, including the free JMRI version, do not seem to allow me to just have the application generate a random list of movements. At this point in my layout's development stage, I don't care if a tank car is dropped off at a lumber yard siding. I just want to have the fun of moving cars around. In the back of my mind I am thinking of writing my own software application down the line. However, the other night I had the simple idea of writing down on a piece of paper all the cars I have (you could use a word processing application as well). I cut the individual "entries" out, so that I wound up with a pile of pieces of paper, each listing a car's road name and number, as well as the type of car. I then shuffled the pile around. Next, I randomly put one such piece of paper at each car-spot on my layout. The "operations" objective was to move a car from where it was currently on the layout to where the piece of paper had it going. I spent an hour and a half over two nights having fun switching my layout. I guess this dove-tails into Jeff Madden's article in the June Dispatch about how to enjoy this hobby of ours using little or no money. Until I get more serious into operations (i.e. no tank cars delivered to lumber yards anymore), I'll use this method to just have a relaxing 30-45 minutes enjoying my layout at the end of the day. Enjoy, - Peter. -- Peter Vanvliet ([email protected]) Houston, Texas My Model Railroad Site (RSS feed) Fourth Ray Software Houston S Gaugers N.A.S.G. --
