ne of my favorite runs – the Florida East Coast. And funny anecdote – I’d been dispatching so much recently (twice this week already) that when I wrote Ken and asked if maybe I could just run trains this time, he quickly agreed, making me double-think it. Was I not that good? Did I do something wrong last time? Why doesn’t he beg me to run the panel? Turns out he wanted to run a more intimate session (not with candles and romantic music and a valentine chocolate box, no, but with only five engineers in the room. He’d generated our special schedules, all for us, and off we went. I was really looking forward to this.

My first run was simple – the return trip for the Eau Gallie limestone run. But I still had a meet at Palm Bay- running on ABS signalling and not CTC, it was a pretty smooth run. Made the meet on the roll, threw turnouts for each other, got the DS to clear me in before I stopped (a nice rolling meet) and in I went.

The second run was a step up in complexity – the Buenaventura turn. My train was built and ready to roll but I had to wait for Chip to clear into Cocoa Yard – nipped around his crummy and headed down-helix for my switching puzzle. I’ll admit to two things:

First, When I got down there, I happened to glance at Chip’s cards back at Cocoa. That’s when I noticed a bunch of cars for me. Was I supposed to pick them up? Or was they for next session. As it stood, my inbound train was pretty short (three cars). Did I miss an important step? (Answer: No, I found out later that your train starts built and Chip’s cars are for another day).

Second, it’s been a long time since I switched (even run). We haven’t even had a Tuscarora session as of late. Could I even do this sort of work? Didn’t help that the dispatcher was watching my moves from his Sputnik cams and saw that I was not doing the caboose-in-Stark-Truss official procedure and called me out on the overhead. I’m pretty sure I could have pulled it off – I had a place figured out for it. But no, I caved to management pressure and did it the “official” way. And actually, the switching was pretty easy (though I had to double-for-home with nine cars returning). That was really a blast, and a nice change from dispatching.

The last train was a reefer shift running north, a pretty easy deal with a bit of switching. Noticed Cocoa yard was filling up and asked the Super if he wanted it cleared. With an approval, I overloaded a couple of southbounds with extra cars. At one point, I was overloading Terry – he got down to Buenaventura and then checked his cards. All wrong! Of course, he’d been writing in times and car numbers while switching Cocoa. Since I was waiting for him further down the line, I jumped in to help him. Turns out the cards he had were for the cars he’d dropped, and vice versa. But we were still short a number of cards. Terry, Kyle and I looked all over for them – the yard pockets, the layout, the packets, everywhere. Then Terry found them inside his pants’ pockets. Great.

Anyway, when it was all said and done, Terry got a bit grilled in the debrief about not following the schedule on his last run. I felt bad and was not sure if he was in the right or wrong – Terry did argue his innocence a little (but nobody wants to piss off the owner, so he accepted the guilt). But the next day, the owner sent out an apology – he looked over the published schedules that night and discovered that the relationships between the trains was unclear and that no clear guilt could be assigned to Terry (not for running out of sequence, but then again, Ken didn’t know about the pocket-full-o-cards trick). So everyone came away clear of their sins and we all had a great session after all.

Thanks for having us, Ken & Bev. And running trains is harder than I thought – I got home and passed out.

P.S. I’m ready to go back to the panel. Sod this train running stuff!

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