Designing a Model Railway Control Panel

If you want to have a dispatching system on your layout, you don't have to go to all the electronics and everything that's involved. You can do that and have a CTC machine, but a simpler way to do that is to have a magnetic board with a track plan graphic plus magnets that you move around on the layout to show you the progression of the train. Here CN-3 has left Chattanooga track five and is now in Jackson. And it will move around the layout in different places, and you'll be talking to the operators on the radio to learn where the train is, and they'll tell you it's OSed at so-and-so town and then you move the magnet along with it. You'll notice that the magnets are different colors. On this next shift that we're gonna run, we're only running the blue shift, and the red shift and the green shift don't run. They're just placeholders, they stay on those tracks throughout the session. These blue magnets will move around the layout and perhaps another blue one will come in and occupy this track later in the session. But this helps you to keep track of what's available, because we operate three different sessions. Each is different than the previous. All the operators have a radio set to the channel that we're all using so we can all talk to each other, but their main job is to be able to talk to the dispatcher. Here I have a microphone and an earphone so I can listen to everything they're saying, get all the instructions about when they OS, where they are, what's happening, do we need to make any changes in our schedule. And that's all because of the radios. We also here have a clock, a fast clock that it's a slave off the master clock. There's about seven or eight clocks on the layout, and they all run at three to one, so that means that an hour on the layout is actually 20 minutes in real time. So you use up three hours in one real hour, layout time, that is. And the other thing that you have here for the dispatcher is a dispatcher's record of train movements. And that's simply a list of all the trains that are gonna run that day, where they start, where they end, and a little bit about if they're a run-through, they switch, they do this, they do that, they terminate on track so-and-so, and you'd put in the crew, the name, and the time they leave. And over here on this side is the time they're supposed to leave. A lot of times, they don't leave at that time, they leave later. But anyway, you keep track of that, and that's where you know everything is and how it's all progressing, and the layout is under control. Another thing that I might mention is the listing of the duties for the dispatcher, and I've got it written down here, Bluff City Southern Dispatcher Duties, and it tells you what he's supposed to do, everything that he's required to get done throughout the day. And it's just a help to him in case he's new at it, he knows what he has to do. This just shows you that you don't have to spend a lot of time, effort, and money on a big, complicated electronic CTC board if you don't want to.