Reading & Chesapeake Operations Paperwork

MRRM is a tool to create a supply and demand, traffic based railroad workload and the necessary railroad information to move ladings (goods) from Shippers to Consignees. There are two major components: Industry Activity and Railroad Activity.

Industry Activity

The Industry Activity component specifies the commodity workload to be imposed on your railroad and other railroads that interchange with your railroad. The components of Industry activity are: Lading (Commodities) supported by your railroad, shipping and receiving activity by industries that use your railroad, shipper production and consignee consumption specifications, pairing buyers and sellers and balancing these, time interval based buyer order generation, seller shipment generation, railroad back office shipment routing and car assignment, and car ordering from foreign yards, if required.

Railroad Activity

The Railroad component supports the Back Office as well as Train and Yard activities.

The railroad back office receives the Shipper's request for the commodity to be picked up at its specified location and set out at the Consignee's specified location. This legal document of temporary ownership is called a Bill of Lading (BoL). The BoL functions as a receipt, as evidence of or containing the contract of carriage and as a document of title.

The railroad back office then manages the following actions for current BoLs:

BoL performance involves Car Ordering, Shipment Routing and Car Assignment, Waybills, Schedules, Manifest, Hostler Consist Orders, Yardmaster Switchlists, and Conductor Switchlists.

Video example of creating waybills, schedules, manifests and switchlists for one type of Lading involving two Shippers and two Consignees:

Completing all movements, needed for the first two shipments in the video above, requires 10 trains in a twelve hour period .

Three windows are collated in the following image: manifests, shipments and train rules windows. Note that in addition to the six locals run from Reading, Philadelphia or Erie yards, four way freights were needed to move empty or full cars between these three yards.

Notice that in the shipments window, two shipments were created to move empty cars back to their respective home yards

The train rules for the Philly local chosen is shown in the Train Rules window.

There are 84 industries moving commodities (ladings) in railroad cars between producers and consumers on our railroad - 12 which are reachable via one of our four interchanges. Our current Industry activity moves 40 types of Lading.  These are our Commodity Buying and Selling Industries.

To keep up with the total industry production and consumption of these commodities, our simulation predicts that the railroad must move about 120 cars per day (each requiring a Waybill). These moves require about 20 trains of about six cars per train.

Each train requires a manifest with the waybills for each car, a schedule of train stops and a switchlist specifying the pickups and setouts at each stop.

A Session Timetable provides a spreadsheet of stop activity for all trains run in a given day.