Operating sessions 98 and 99

This last weekend I hosted a pair of operating sessions on my layout, intended as a kind of “dry run” for the upcoming bi-annual BayRails operating weekend here in the Bay Area. These happened to be sessions no. 98 and 99 on the present layout. As I wanted to happen, a couple of modifications to the operating scheme worked well; as I didn’t really want to happen, a couple of electrical glitches popped up, but of course better now than with out-of-town visitors.

I used my usual set-up approach with freight cars in various locations, to be switched in various ways in accord with the waybills and other paperwork. Here is a view looking toward the Shumala depot (middle distance), illustrating what the first crew at Shumala faces when they begin work.  The foreground track is the main line of Southern Pacific’s Coast Division.

What you see is a mixture of cars headed up the branch to Ballard and Santa Rosalia, along with cars to be switched within Shumala, and some ready for pickup by the Guadalupe Local, a train that will pass by toward the middle of the session.

The crews for session 98 were Mike Stewart, Bob Fisher, Dan Miller and Robert Bowdidge. The photo below shows Robert at left, and Dan holding the throttle, while they were working at Ballard.

For session 99, we had a last-minute cancellation by one attendee for health reasons, so we operated with three people only. I volunteered to be engineer, but Mark Schutzer said he actually would prefer to do the entire job by himself, so he proceeded to do so. With all the years of experience under his belt, he worked efficiently and every bit as fast as a two-person crew. Here he is at Ballard.

The other crew was Seth Neumann and Jon Schmidt, shown below during their stint at Shumala. It looks like Seth (at left) was the engineer at this point, as he's holding the throttle.

These were valuable sessions for me, as a set-up for how I will structure my BayRails sessions, though I confess it is hard to wrap my brain around having had 99 sessions on the layout in its present form. But it must be true; I have records of all the sessions. Never thought about getting this far. But the best news was that everyone had a good time and seemed to thoroughly enjoy themselves.

Tony Thompson