This past weekend I hosted two operating sessions, with the sequence numbers you see in the title today. As I always do, I rotated most of freight cars from the previous session off the layout, and rotated the same approximate number of different cars onto the layout. This always leads to differences in industries switched and thus in the character of the jobs on the layout.
I also renovated the scenery in the area of my mainline tunnel, Tunnel 12, trying to make the rockfall rubble at the foot of the rock face more realistic, along with some ground cover repair, as is visible below. This section house near the tunnel entrance was a common arrangement on Southern Pacific, probably to facilitate maintenance of the tunnel itself.
We began on Saturday, with a crew of four consisting of Jim Radkey, Clif Linton, Tom Comyns, and Ed Slintak, all of whom had operated here before and thus had a pretty good idea of how the layout works. Below you see Ed (at left) and Clif working at Ballard; Clif was the conductor here.
Later in the session, after crews had switched sides, Tom (at left below) and Jim were switching at Ballard. If I remember correctly, Tim was conducting at this point.
The following day, the crew comprised Seth Neumann, Richard Brennan, Lisa Gorrell, and her friend, Laura McKeenan. Below is a photo of the whole group at Ballard, with, from left, Laura, Richard, Lisa and Seth.
Seth and Lisa began at Ballard, with Seth conducting; Lisa was the engineer.
It was an interesting session, with its own challenges and problems. As so often happens, several of the challenges kept their heads down during my testing and dry run, choosing instead to appear only at the operating session. Fighting down an attack of “Host Flaw Hysteria” (for background: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2023/07/pressure-what-pressure.html ), I enjoyed seeing the layout being operated as I intended it to be.
Tony Thompson
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