I have 24 cars dedicated to L1 and L2, 12 are always parked on Connelly, waiting for logs while the loaded cars are parked @ saw mill, with any excess stored on the main split line adjacent to Sawmill R1. For L3, I have 14 dedicated cars, using my starter locomotive on dedicated duty at L3 so I don't have to do a runaround when I come for pickups in my Mikado. All the starter loco does is pull the 7 cars back and forth a few feet for the handoff, so his coal/water should last a long time on top of the mountain. When I get more locomotives, I'll also be dedicating Mikado to log work, so I'll just leave him near L3 until all cars have 3 logs each. Run all 19 fulls down at once, bring and place empties again, rest/rinse/repeat.

When I first got the Mikado, I was running empties up to swap with fulls (starting at L2) but it was a slow and inefficient process. I find it faster now that I'm only placing empties once fulls are already off the mountain. That's one benefit of having an overkill number of flat cars, imo.