You are yard master and as fast as you get a train out and clear a track another comes in. With all tracks full, a through freight and a local are schedule for a meet in the yard. Your switcher which is pushing a cabin is pinned by the through freight in a siding by the through freight hold on the main. A coal drag is waiting departure on track 2 for the cabin and waybills (which the guy driving the last inbound had never delivered). But what makes it fun is a consist that was just released from an inbound train loses control on the way back to the stable. He’s now barreling down the main toward the inbound local holding at the yard limits. Until we get it under control, no one is moving.
Are we going to have to wait until next week, same bat-time, same bat-channel, to find out what happens?
I hope it’s not something boring like “Ernie climbed under the layout and pulled the plug.” I wanna hear something like “Chip climbed to the third cab, de-consisted the locomotive, and stopped the runaway by applying full power in reverse.”
Actually I got out on the track and put my hands on the on the lead locomotive and slowed it to a stop, while the conductor ran off to get the train master, who eventually got control of the train.
There for a moment I thought you was the YM at the club…We don’t have run aways but,things do get very hectic at times.I even seen a melt down where the layout was backed up.This can be cause by:
1.A new YM that hasn’t learn the job.
2.A influx of inbound trains from the Cincinnati yard and St.Louis(stagging).
The “right on the verge of meltdown” sounds very prototypical. OTOH, a prototype runaway would have needed more than a yardmaster’s laying on of hands to prevent something REALLY UGLY from happening.
Of course, in ordinary operations, your “runaway” would have had a crew on board, and the engineer would have brought it to a safe stop at the first red signal.
(By the way, what happened to the human who should have been controlling that loco - or does somebody else use the “fire and forget” system of dispatching?)
Chuck (modeling Central Japan in September, 1964 - analog DC, MZL, which permits fire and forget dispatching but makes collisions impossible)
The layout is a double decker club-sized layout that holds 2 ops sessions a month. At this session there were two kids that were running trains and the dispatcher was absent. The yard masters made up their trains as usual, but there were no train orders. Things ran fairly smoothly, but both major yards had an unbalance of incoming trains at times.
It was a kid that lost control of his train. He actually hooked on to my switcher with a challenger and started dragging it backwards along with a twelve full coal yards and dragged it onto the main in front of the through freight. When he unhooked my switcher, the train took off toward the yard limits and he lost communications with it from his throttle. To make matters worse, he left the car cards for his inbound at the other yard and it took us a while to find the documentation we needed to send the next train out.
Chuck,
Basically, he got a lot of old timers shaking their heads and an oh well from the train master.
Sounds like the good ol’ days of DC. I was DS’ing at a club I belonged and I put a guy in the hole while he took a quick break. Typical style for him, he turned off the block for the siding. another op was rolling by, and instead of switching on the next block past the siding, he inadvertently (ie, not paying attention) switched on the siding. Needless to say the train back out over the closed switch derailing AND got hit by the guys train. Not to mention all the head-ons we had in the engine terminal. Thank goodness such things never happen with DCC[:-^][;)][(-D]