Today I found some time to finish building the schedule for a late 60's operations session on the Welztalbahn, and prepared the trains with appropriate rolling stock.
Over the last few months I retired several cars that no longer meet standards, and made some focused purchases to fill gaps in the fleet. Deutsche Bundesbahn retired steam locomotives by 1975. I've focused my collection on classes that were still in use through the end of steam. Conversely, most Diesel types used in the 70's were already in operation in the 1960's, too. Thus, with most of my rolling stock being late era III and early era IV I can visibly shift time back and forth a bit by varying the locomotive mix and pay attention to the passenger car paint schemes. It helps that stock with the older paint schemes often did not get a full paint job well into the 1970's and 80's.
I finished identifying related runs into an "Umlauf", assigned a locomotive and cars to each, and arranged the schedules, plus cards, for each such train set. The schedules, locomotive card, and car cards are kept in sleeves. This is a new addition to operations on the Welztalbahn and I'm very curious how well this will work during a session. Especially for freight trains, I suspect that there will be issues with not having sufficient work space to store the sleeve while working with the car cards. However, I'm hoping that the combination of prototype paperwork, instructions, and rolling stock cards in one place will be useful to operators.
Some freight cars on the layout are still missing their way bills, so I need to finish creating those, as well as make and print car cards for the passenger trains.
Once that is done -- and some more track cleaning, too -- I should be ready for a shake down session operating the schedule without the fast clock.
The Welztalbahn hasn't run in operations for almost two years, and I'm getting really close now. I fully expect gremlins to come out of their hiding places as soon as I try ...
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