atience, or forbearance, is the ability to endure difficult or undesired long-term circumstances. Patience involves perseverance or tolerance in the face of delay, provocation, or stress without responding negatively, such as reacting with disrespect or anger. Patience is also used to refer to the character trait of being disciplined and steadfast.

I had a bad session on the Tuscarora the other night. It was rainy and a couple of the guys didn’t show up. To be honest, the guy running the scheduled train lost interest in slow and steady train handling, watching for signals and (even when he saw they were red) proceeding through them. Since I was operating as the Tuscarora Station Operator, I had a lot of time to observe his affect on my session.

And it wasn’t good.

Since he was dicking around, one of my other operators started wandering off when he had to wait. It was sort of one of those well, if he’s going to act like that, why shouldn’t I? things. That caught me by surprise since the affected guy is usually a solid operator. At one point, I asked everyone (without anger, just a question) if we should stop the session. I think that brought everyone – literally – back to the table. We finished but it was a pretty rough go.

Pin-effing-point accuracy at stopping at red boards. Eventually the engineer gave up on all that blinky-light stuff (Photo: Zach B)

But what I realized was that, if I had to rank the operators on their abilities, I’d do so ranking them by their patience. To me, that was a clear indicator of how well you can run a train. I’ve seen that at La Mesa club, where you might wait for three hours on a siding. And at a local HO club, where they were starting fresh with a dispatcher who (it seemed) hadn’t even reviewed warrants and how they are employed before giving them a go. I’ve even seen it at a top-notch layout that runs as smooth as silk. One old guy made it 2/3rds of the way through the session and then decided he was going to go play with his grandkids. It was clear he’d decided he’d operated enough. Now, this layout only hosts five and every position is critical. I ended up doubling up (both my job and his, doing that one-legged-ass-kicking stuff to get everything done. I didn’t appreciate it and mentioned it at the end of the session to the host, who told me that that person would not be invited back.

I’ll make allowances for newbies and older people. For reasons of inexperience and diminished mental capacity, they have a hard time running some of the elements of a op session. But patience is something you need. It tells me directly how well you’ll stick to a job, what sort of an effort you’ll make and if you’ll grouse and even get angry. Patience is both a virtue as well as a yardstick. And the thing about yardsticks – they hurt when you’re hit with one.

Just like it hurts when you stop getting invites to sessions.

So do yourself a favor – when you agree to a session, come with your focus dialed up. Put the phone down, stop glancing at magazines, and knock it off with the windy chatter and jokes. The rest of us are here to enjoy a time and place in our portable history machine. And we don’t want you ruining it for us.

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