Hell’s Home Signal. Abandon hope all yea who run here (John DV)

ears ago, my father passed away at 4am at a local hospital. By 9am that morning, I was writing his obituary. “You’re the writer,” my family told me.

Yes, so it’s a bit like that.

It was a very stormy night on the railroad last night. Tempers high, expectations low, waits long, and on improperly aligned turnouts – shorts. There are a number of issues we had – most of them you know, some of them I don’t know, but yeah, let’s debrief it from my point of view.

The dispatcher had a number of issues. First off: the east side guy couldn’t make it so our plucky (read: optimistic (re-read: foolish)) dispatcher decided to take on the entire route himself. And to do so, he used my computerized dispatching program – when I saw him booting it up, I saw it was the older version and I didn’t want to freak him out that if he misclicked in certain spots, it would crash. And he eventually did. And it did. I posted him a new version last night when I got home.

A night at the Opera, complete with drums and tubas. We’re at capacity, both in crowds and on the road (Chris S)

And, kid, you did a good job but your communications need work (just saying). You need to be quick and concise and not wordy. Also, calling overhead, you call once or twice but you shouldn’t yell. It’s busy in the room, full of distractions, and some people are helping others, sitting dejectedly, even biting down on their suicide false-teeth. The session is yours and you need to control it. And yes, I’ve lost it before, too. A certain L&N session comes to mind, me running about, bleeding.

Order up. Zach faces the lunch rush with four crews. Notice the empty yard – every local and stack train is out on the line (Pete F)

This was the wrong night to run units with “speed lettering”. (Jude S)

And things were  not helped by the odor of dead rat coming from the ceiling (though I think Zeus hyperventilating sucked it all out of the air). But the worst was the clock – when you short on turnouts, there is a small chance that digitrax sends a false signal down the line to the clock, bumping it up to double-speed. This means that trains are coming out of staging at twice the figured rate, and the line fills up. Boss level for sure. Anyway, I do have a simple fix for that which I’ll discuss with the ops committee.

Now, crews – most of you did pretty well, given the situations. However, we had a lot of newbies in the room, some of them unaware it was ops night and just running trains around at 7:02pm. This meant perfectly capable crews (meaning, in this case, me, but also John C, John L, and who knows what other Johns) got pulled out of service to conduct. But I’m glad to see that so many people stepped away form their seniority-earning jobs to shepherd the sheep about.

One thing – yes, the radios rapidly went to shit and the dispatcher was struggling. I would have gone back to take over east side but, as mentioned, I was conducting. However, you can help out by just keeping your cool on the line and not follow the Well’s School of Radio Procedure (i.e. complaining to the dispatcher). This just throws off the session, wastes time and does no good. Please, we all know how the radio system works. We need to stick to it better.

97 staggers into Pittsburgh in the dead of night, late on the clock, even late on the calendar (Matthew J)

Still, even given the total shambles that ensued (I saw 223 go by after night fell – he was on the railroad all day), the crews largely stuck to their guns and limped the session home to conclusion. Pretty much everything ran and a number of people (Phil, Newer Zack and Christian, to name those I noticed) took jobs they normally don’t do. That helps out more than you know, and you didn’t take people off the line for hand-holding. And that’s how the railroad gets done.

Christian works Mingo after Gilligan called in to cancel (John DV)

So yes, that one is done and dusted, one of the more challenging sessions. We’ll figure out the admin jobs (dispatchers and yards) in our next business meeting and see what’s going to go down. If we have anyone new (or green) I’ll take the copilot’s seat in the back. Don’t worry – we’ll make it a point to try to give our club a really good session – you guys come out, some long distances, for just that. And we’re grateful.

And that’s the obit. Rest in peace.

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I hope DeVasto takes an interest in old 40′ bunker reefers. These monsters are a pain to get into Federal Cold (John DV)

Patrick is becoming “Ore King”, rolling loads into Lehigh past the distant signals (Luke L)

Chisholm rolled stacks all night. Here, he runs the edge above a Chinese stone wall I carved in back in 1995 or so (Jeff C)

271 holds in Red Rock while another freight checks his insurance papers before giving “Ham-fisted Pete” a shot at swapping him out in Martin (Kyle S)

You got me. One train holds the main at Harris, another passes up the siding. God knows what the plan is here (John DV)

247 bursts out of CTC confinement and hits the rails after a long wait. Behind him, X982 eases up to the starter signal, ever hopeful of freedom (Luke L).

A three-way meet at Zanesville. At least nobody is on the industrial track this time (Matthew J)

I think the Rolling Stock Committee needs to check out some of the trains we ran last night. I didn’t hear how this eventually fared (Pete F)