Seems like we have lots of on-going threads for all sorts of things except for operating sessions. Here is a place to describe operating sessions attended, what was interesting, what was learned.
And I’ll post the first. Saturday night we meet at one of the newer layouts in this rotation. The purpose of the session was to help test out the new block occupancy detection and computer interface.
Bruce Chubb’s computer interface(CMRI) has been used. It communicates to the computer which displays a schematic of the track plan. As the train moves from block to block the occupied sections are red the unoccupied are green. Many of us sat there watching the display screen as the track sections changed colors.
The theme was “Rock slide in Gore canyon”. D&RGW trains are forced to move north over the UP. Due to Rio Grande power shortages CB&Q power and Western Pacific power will be handling the Saturday CZ trains. The Rio Grande power will be handling the 2 Friday trains that were between Denver and Salt Lake when the rock slide occurred. The UP is expecting to forward at least 4 CZ trains Saturday night along with its usual streamliner schedule. The UP will only allow high speed power along this section of the overland route to keep things moving so no mallets allowed.
As such we all took our California Zephyr trains. The layout is basically a double track main line approximately 5 smiles in length. I got assigned an eastbound track. Due to the heavy Thanksgiving holiday traffic I took out the second section of the Zephyr behind an D&RGW Alco PA. The first section was powered by CB&Q E8s. Later I was assigned another eastbound but this time I was the first section and the train was behind a set of CB&Q F3s. Through the night, all told, no less than six California Zephyrs were running simultaneously. At the end we pulled five of them together for a photo op. Unfortunately the single stripe D&RGW F9 powered Zephyr had already retired for the night.
On fo
Sure, why not?
My club, the South Shore Model Railway Club of Hingham, MA, currently has bi-monthly operations sessions that take place on 2 nights, a Monday and the following Thursday. The sessions start at 8:00pm and go until 10:00pm. The operation has had as few as 7 members and as many as 25. The layout is Digitrax DCC equipped, and is approx. 60’ x 36’ (so far). We run about 30 trains total, which includes 5 locals, 6 commuters, 4 local passengers, 4 “name train” passengers, 10 mainline freights of various types, and a couple extras to keep things interesting. The trains run on a 6 to 1 fast clock ratio, and locals are switched with switch lists with clipboards. All locos have to be registered with the club, and each gets a “loco card” that has important info on it, like DCC address. Each train has a pre-printed Train Order that tells it what to do, and when to do it.
After each session, we have a critique that I record on tape. I then listen to the tape later and transcribe the thoughts of all involved. This report is put in our monthly club newsletter under the title, “The Operator”. This article is basically the only means of rules enforcement, as we have no “brownie points” or anything like that. So when I write the article, I have to assign an “Oops!” to the party that didn’t follow the rules. But I also have to balance that against hurting people’s egos, so I try to write the article as humorously as possible while still pointing out what they did wrong (hopefully they’ll learn from that).
Here is a snippet from my latest edition of, “The Operator” (with the names changed to protect the guilty and innocent alike):
Official Operation
Great stories!
Great stories!
Last Friday I had an op session in my basement. The concept.shows pictures.
The clock started at 7.30pm. We had about three hours.
On problem was yard operation. I had to halt the clock to give the yard crew some time. Clock ratio was about 1:5. Next time I will try 1:4 or even 1:3.
After the session - next day - I operated myself and found quite a few cars misspotted. [:)]
There were many cars at the Grain elevator which should be in the Grain train at the morning or at the Mill at Plywood District.
This picture from an older session shows Westport yard and the board for car cards. Now I’ve labeled the different spots for car cards at this board.
Perhaps this will help keeping track of the cars. [:)]
Wolfgang
The club I belonged to in the sixties was what was in those days termed a Combination Routing layout and when I joined in 1965 they were in the process of extensively redesinging and rebuilding; they had had a committee involved in the redesign of the trackplan but operating glitches did spring up and if you had operated and had experienced difficulties other than equipment troubles you filled out a form explaining what you had been doing and what had happened. The design committee evaluated problems and these were discussed at the next club meeting; sometimes these problems resulted in operating changes; sometimes trackwork modifications was required. I’ve always felt it was a good system because it worked.
I remember one particular problem which presented itself; on the surface one particular location had always had adequate mainline capacity but a trackwork change tended to jam up trains with the result that the crew switching the industries at that location would frequently find itself jammed in the hole and unable to switch the industries on the north side of the tracks. This was solved by building a third main track through this location as well as scheduling this switch crew through this particular point at a different time.