More granddaughter operating

My granddaughter was in town in town this weekend, as was expected, and I organized a short operating session for her at my layout town of Shumala. I have been trying to guide her into being the conductor, in these sessions, and she gets some of it, but prefers being the engineer. I do notice, though, that occasionally when I ask, “What do we do next?” she usually knows. She is not really a “kid” any longer, having recently celebrated her 13th birthday.

I should mention that she has operated a fair number of times previously on the layout, and on both sides of it (for an earlier example, see: https://modelingthesp.blogspot.com/2021/12/more-family-ops.html ). Sometimes my wife has acted as conductor (with my guidance), but more recently I usually fill that role. The goal is for the granddaughter to enjoy herself.

At the beginning of this session, she leaned all the waybills against the cars, in order to identify which ones were which, which I think is a good step, but then the bills were all moved off the layout to the J-strips on the fascia. Below you see her doing a run-around with the switcher to pick up the cars for the first spots to be done, and looking over the waybills.

From there she moved to East Shumala to take care of the switching there. Here is her train on the main line, approaching East Shumala to switch. A few waybills are still standing up until she gets there, and she has the waybills for her train in her hand.

In East Shumala, she sorted through the pickups and set-outs, and pretty efficiently was able to complete all the moves. Here she is just finishing up that work, with the cars that were already picked up sorted onto the main track, and the last set-outs about ready to place. Here the waybills have been moved to the J-strips.

Then she returned to town to complete a few more pickups and set-outs, along with spotting the loaded reefer she picked up, to the ice deck for icing. In this photo, she has run around the consist again,and is bringing the switcher back so she can retrieve an empty gondola at the sand house. That will complete the work. Waybills are also on the J-strips here.

She did this smoothly and well, and really efficiently in terms of time spent, though of course this was far from her first session on the layout. The work I had assigned for the session was really the same amount as the work I would assign to a typical adult operating crew, except that she didn’t have to assemble the next train to go up the branch.

I don’t detect that she is very interested in the models on the layout as models that could be built or collected, but she does enjoy the work done by a switch crew, whether at Shumala (as shown above), or on the other side of the layout with Ballard and Santa Rosalia. She isn’t ready to act as a conductor (though not far out), but I would not hesitate to assign her as an engineer in a session with skilled operators.That’s fun to observe.

Tony Thompson