Operating sessions 88 and 89

This past weekend I hosted two operating sessions on my layout, which happen to have been nos. 88 and 89 on the layout in its present form. They were especially important to me because of the work I have been doing to correct past problems with trackwork (as described, for example, in this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/04/trackwork-wars-part-12.html ). I wanted to give the new track a full workout. 

Of course, an important preliminary job was to clean up the work area (shown in the post just linked) and restore structures, etc. to their rightful places. And you may note that the new switches are still not ballasted, until I get all the gremlins out of the trackwork.

The first day’s session was manned by Steve Van Meter, Lisa Gorrell, John Rodgers, and Seth Neumann. As crews almost always do, they elected to do half the session on one side of the layout, then switch over and do the second half on the other side from where they started. The photo below shows Lisa (at left) and Seth hard at work in Ballard, with Seth acting as conductor at this point. He’s probably identifying where he wants the engine next.

At the same time, the photo below shows Steve (at left) and John getting through the tasks at Shumala, mostly yard work here at the beginning of the session. It looks like Steve is conducting, since he is holding the paperwork. The clock on the wall shows layout time, not rest-of-the-world time, though it is a 1:1 clock; this permits us to operate in a specific segment of the prototype Southern Pacific timetable for the Guadalupe Subdivision of Coast Division.

Although a couple of layout elements needed repair during the session (switch points coming un-soldered, etc.), generally things worked all right. Here is a photo of the Santa Rosalia Local, ready to return to Shumala with the cars it has picked up during its run.

I should mention one other “feature” of the operating session, which I will explain, since the background is known to a very small number of people. Years ago at the annual Cocoa Beach meeting (for a few words about this year’s meeting, see: http://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/01/cocoa-beach-2024.html ), several of the early arriving attendees would repair to Mike Brock’s house and operate on his very nice Sherman Hill UP layout. Some years back, Bill Schneider (an O&W modeler) slipped an O&W coal hopper under the coal dock on the layout, understandably to Mike’s mystification and the great amusement of everyone else. The hopper remained there ever since. 

This year, with Mike having passed away last year, some of us were offered the chance to receive a freight car from Mike’s layout. I immediately seized the O&W hopper, and I intend it to surface from time to time on my layout, as a kind of memory of Mike’s layout. Bill knows I have the car, and seemed to feel it was going to a good home. Here is how it looked this weekend, with missing waybill as usual:

All in all, a pretty good session. Several things I wanted to ensure would work well for the upcoming ProRail event did work well. The new trackwork unfortunately is still not completely right, though better than it was. I will continue refining it. 

And I keep reminding myself of my friend Paul Weiss’s important observation (which he named “Host Flaw Hysteria”): the host feels like 5 percent of the layout misbehaving ruins the entire session, while the visitors realize that 95 percent worked fine, and pretty much overlook that 5 percent. May it remain true.

Tony Thompson