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Dale's Depot

Daley Train Log
Page 122

Sunday January 2, 2011 Lethbridge, Alberta

1:30 PM

I played around with a few parameters in ShipIt! earlier this morning. I now want to begin by noting the current status of the Balancing Summary Report, and compare it with the previous values from December 29/10.

The Balancing Summary Report

	Dec 29 begin	Dec 29 end	Jan 2 begin	Jan 2 end
overall quality (low is good)	93.4	92.0	89.6	86.8
avg cars requested	41.4	35.4	38.0	37.7
Quality grade - actual	A	AAA	AAA	AAA
Quality grade - minimum cars	AA	AAAA	AAAA	AAAA
Quality grade _ maximun cars	A	AAA	AAA	AAA

I still have not figured out why CN 1244, a Buffet/Lounge passenger car, is sitting at the Coaldale Station instead of being part of Trains 100 & 101.

Here is a summary of the information from the Town Industry Report at the beginning of Jan 2:

Town	Industry	Product	% ship	% rec	avg loads
Jasper	Jasper Coaling Tower	coal gondola	0	100	2
	Parkland Meats	meat	0	100	2
	36 St warehouse	furniture	0	100	1
		clothing	0	100	1
		fruit	0	100	1
		office supplies	0	100	1
		automobiles	0	100	1
	Jasper station	office supplies exp	100	0	1
		passengers coach	100	0	1
		passengers cafe	100	0	1
		passengers parlor	100	0	1
		passengers buffet	100	0	1

This seems wrong to me. The Jasper station is only shipping passengers but it is not receiving any.

Although not a problem the situation at the 36 St warehouse might be improved if I had furniture shipped instead of received. This would, in principle, allow the same boxcar to be used as an empty. I will try it and see if it makes any difference.

I have changed the 36 St warehouse to a shipper for furniture and changed the Queenston Cartage as a consignee for furniture.

I tried changing Train 100 so it generates moves in Jasper.

Looking at the reports that seems to bring the 5 passenger cars together in one train (good!) but it still lists the Jasper station as shipping but not receiving passengers.

Moving the furniture seemed to help the balancing score a little. It is now 86.9.

FM (flat car for lumber) requires a minimum of 2 cars, but I only have 1. I will try increasing the time between shipments from 24 to 48. Nope. It still says I need 2 cars. Okay. I noticed one of the setting was asking for 2 cars. I changed that to 1 and that removed the error.

I also noticed that I have an FB (flat bulkhead car) on the layout that is not being used.

I have added this and that is another slight improvement.

I have now run another complete session of Deluxe Balancer and have filled in the last column of the first table on this web page.

As near as I can tell both the passenger trains and the unit coal trains are running properly - at least both consists appear to be stable.

The Balancing Summary Report does not list any errors, but it does indicate 6 warnings plus 7 discrepancies in the Balancing Information Report.

The Car Mix Report identifies 3 warnings. I should be able to eliminate these by adding a few more shippers/consignees.

The Product Overlap Report and the Siding Length Report both indicate zero difficulties (this is the first time that I have had no problems listed here!).

I am going to try eliminating the warnings listed in the Balancing Summary Report, while at the same time not creating any new errors. Then I should be read to try running the Deluxe Balancer to see if it can optimize the balancing of my layout.