Zach2 backs his Great Pumpkin unit out, ready to pull coal in TBL heavy ops! (Zeus H)

I might as well just stayed out there, with all the orders I was hooping up. (Pete F)

ell, second weekend in a row for the Tuscarora Branch Line. This time, I took my own advice from last week and brought in cookies and offered free sodas to the crews to keep them all jingly on sugar. And it seemed to work. Not only did we run a full session this time, we did it in three hours!

So, we were short one guy (I think he was training on Dagobah). Still, we had Shemp on the scheduled freights, Zach2 on the coal patrol, and Zeus doing his keyboard odyssey up in the tower. Me, I was station operator for Tusk and kinda-sorta dispatcher.

Couple of observations – it was a lot of fun (that’s first and foremost).  Second, I suddenly realized that I have extra designations backwards – everyone thinks of train numbers as odd=west, even=east. I have it backwards and it really did confuse me. Also, I should have had a better way of keeping track of time. Originally I just anchored time to whatever scheduled train was running (“It’s now EM-1 O’clock!”) and that worked fine until mid-session when both trains started doing continuous meets. This put our timetabled train two hours in the hole and threw me off for some time. In the end (because of many meets), 913 (the Easton return job) didn’t conclude until 9:30pm, about the time the first tidewater was coming through. With the clock in tatters, we just finished up the session with the coal engine making it back to Jacob’s about midnight, just long enough for a quick refuel before pushing off again.

Zach picks up his first MTs of the day, closing the knuckles at 12:30am. Note those snazzy station signs! (Pete F)

But the crews dealt with every little thing, from heavy opposing traffic to random events (we ran two – first was loose livestock on the Easton Mainline, the second was a false alert (literally a no-event event I put in to cause non-havoc). Shemp switched really well and worked out his troubles on the ground, and Zach2 really figured out the coal quickly, getting eight loads through for the night. And Zeus (our event sponsor – TBL was brought to you by ACL) did a usual masterful job on tower (a job Zach2 is eyeing – another leverman is born). Of course, you might have noticed the GEVO scraping fences and signals. This is the second time we’ve run it and the first in ops and it worked just fine.

Shemp pauses a Zeus-Unit near Lowery’s Brickyard. First, I don’t know what they needed a reefer for. And second, yeah, we sent it off the wrong way (Pete F)

The Tidewater breaks at 10:30pm, Zach2 scraping past and overlong EM-2. We’ve already admitted to the reason (Zeus H)

While everything went where it was supposed to go, we did appear a little long on the branch line at the end. At first, I shrugged it off. Then I realized that the reefer car that came in on the Phantom Midnight Train (placed at the Tuscarora Team Track) was not there. In the confusion of the Pee Dee, picking up everything and putting it in their places, the reefer accidental-like was added to the outbound. So you guys in Martin this Saturday night, you might want to keep an eye out for that. Send it back to us via Shelfton if you please.

Overall, it was a fun, fast session with a good crew. I’ve learned my session-lessons. Next time, even extras go east, clock time is manually kept if no dispatcher is about, and I bring in sugar cubes to keep the crew high. My secrets to success!

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Just in time for Halloween – pretty tall management guy at the freight house. He’s looking down at the “little people working the docks”. (Photo and AI fun: Pete F) (And I think that’s supposed to be me, if I heard right)

Pete is a darling when asleep, even though his snores make our ears pop (Zeus H)