I recently acquired Assignment Book #2 to Timetable #2, effective November 18, 2002. Though outdated, it's more current than the October 1986 assignment book.
I can figure out 90% of the book. I need the forum to fill in the missing 10%.
There are revenue, equipment, and shop trains. I'm guessing equipment trains are deadheads to position a train for a trip from a different terminal than its current location. They are numbered >3000 and <6000. But what is a shop train? Shop trains don't have numbers as an identification but letters to indicate origin and destination. For example, JP233 is a shop train that travels from Jamaica to Penn Station and leaves Jamaica at 2:33 AM.
The front of the book (yellow pages) lists crew and collector assignments for every train. Every train as a crew (engineer) but not every revenue train has collectors. And some trains only have one collector. A train with one collector. That sounds odd. Also, the collector positions aren't identified as conductor nor assistant conductor.
As a note, a holiday section determines which jobs work Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's and Memorial Days and Washington's Birthday. You don't sign up and somebody makes a decision who works.