June operating sessions

I mostly host operating sessions on my layout during the non-summer months, in part because many people on my operators list often have summer plans. But this year I chose to have a pair of sessions last weekend. The layout was mostly spruced up, because of hosting ProRail in April (see my post about that: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/04/prorail-2024.html ). 

The one thing that had been ongoing since ProRail was my effort to improve the trackage between my towns of Ballard and Santa Rosalia (for a recent post, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2024/05/trackwork-wars-part-14.html ). That track is now better than it was, but still not right. I will have to continue efforts there, but for now operation was at least possible.

For this pair of operating sessions (the second was the 93rd for the present version of the layout), my visiting operators were Michael Litant, Adam Palmer, Steve Van Meter and David Baird on Saturday the 22nd, and John Sutkus, Dan Miller, Richard Brennan and Jeff Allen on Sunday the 23rd. 

On both days, a new feature was added: the truck dump alongside Bromela Road in Ballard was active, and had loaded an ore car with chromite ore (for background on California chromite mining, and information on just what chromite is, see this post: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2016/10/modeling-mining-in-your-locale.html ). Here is the Monarch Mining Company ore car awaiting pickup, with a dump truck visible on the dump ramp behind the car:

On Saturday, Michael and Adam paired off to begin work at Shumala. The photo below shows them in the midst of the switching, with Adam at right, holding the waybills, evidently the conductor at this point.

Meanwhile, at Ballard, Steve (at left) was the conductor, with David the engineer at this point. They were very meticulous in getting all the switching done correctly.

On Sunday, as usually happens, the same crew patterns were seen. The photo below shows Richard Brennan at left, wearing the conceptual conductor’s hat, and Jeff Allen behind him, holding the throttle for the switch engine at Shumala.

The other crew at Ballard at that point was John Sutkus, conducting at left, and his engineer, Dan Miller. Dan is a relative novice at this kind of operation, but allowed himself to be persuaded to take a try at conducting when these two took their turn at Shumala. He took it one problem at a time, and got the work done in a creditable amount of time!

Crews had fun both days, and obviously were enjoying themselves, despite that one bit of bad track leading to Santa Rosalia. I tried to remember that “big picture” and not succumb to Host Flaw Hysteria, in which the layout owner assumes small problems overwhelm large successes, which luckily is hardly ever true.

Tony Thompson