ne of the problems we faced on our club layout is staffing up trains and running everything.

On a home layout, that really isn’t a problem. If you wish to do it this way, you can tie in a firm understand with your operators that – outside of special cases – you stay until the session is over. And you should attend a debrief (the owner has put a great deal of effort into a session and wants to hear, good and bad, how it went). I was at a session last year where some old duffer decided, in mid-session, to go see his grandkids (leaving me to run two jobs). The hosts never invited him back.

But at a club, the dynamics shift. People pay dues to attend. Even if they don’t, you can’t simply force them to stay through the session. And that left our beloved LM&O in a bit of a quandary. First off, rather than wait for trains to come available, everyone wanted to run out “midnight extras”, setting up their own trains and running them early. The line got bogged with these trains. And then they (and the earlier runners) could nip out for home early. This really wasn’t fair to those who stay to run the entire session since sometimes not all trains get run, so there are fewer meets and less to do for the yardmasters and dispatchers.

That’s when we came up with a simple solution – Seniority Points. We award points for jobs. And the rules are simple.

• You get one point for running a scheduled train (passenger, freight, local). If you run another, you get a second point.
• You get one point for running an extra, but only if you have already run a scheduled train.
• You can only have a maximum of two points per session. You can still run more trains, but you don’t score for them.
• Yardmasters and dispatchers get two points for a session.

Our plans are eventually to award pins (that can be stuck to club shirts or operation aprons). We’re figuring pins for 20 points of dispatching and yardmastering. Also, there will be “level pins” for total points in multiples of 20, those being “brakeman”, “conductor”, “fireman” and “engineer”. We have a guy with a source for pins who can generate them easily enough.

I used to do the same thing on my Cuesta Grade. Each job had “miles” associated with it and you’d get a gold “SP” pin when you hit 10,000 miles (as the average run was 500 miles, it took about 20 runs to make it. One engineer racked up three pins, so that was a lot of running).

We use an Excel sheet to tally it and I send it out to the membership for confirmation each month (sometimes a guy does leave after signing up for a train and someone else runs it – all I really have to go by is the sign-up sheet) Nobody wants to get gypped out of hard-earned points..

You could also use seniority points if there are jobs everyone wants. That’s not a problem on the LM&O – lots to do. But you could figure a system to allow difficult jobs to earn more points and use those points to “buy” desirable jobs. Sound strange? It’s how the real railroads did it.

Something to consider. If you have behaviors you wish to change, consider the carrot before resorting to the stick.

>>>I’LL GIVE YOU TWO POINTS IF YOU BUY A BOOK!<<<

As a post-script, I once heard tell of a railroad that used seniority points to score jobs. One day an engineer ran a meet point and collided with another train. The owner came over, determined who was at fault and told that person “You are fired off the railroad, and have lost all your seniority. You can restart from scratch”.

The other engineer howled in laughter until the owner turned to him. “And you lose all your points because you’re dead.”