was at a Volkswagen-sponsored driving event (this is before they cheated on their EPA numbers (incomprehensible if they were ISO9000-orientated) and before my Volkswagon neo-beetle (1) plastic-rotted and (b) caught fire). Anyway, it was all about helpful high performance driving hints. Yeah, I did learn how to corner much better, how to brake-first then turn, all that. But the most important moment for me was in an event where a row of us sat in front of a light. Simple deal – light goes red, slap the button in front of you. And I had this nailed. Even though I was 45 years old at the time, I played a lot of video games. Certainly…

>FLASH-SLAP!<

The young kid next to me was already mashing the button before I knew the light was red. A couple of more tries. Never came close to his speed. And, yes, lesson learned. I started hanging back from tailgating after that.

But that’s the thing. As we get older, our mental processing slows down, sometimes remarkably. I can see it in my own dispatching. Oh, I’m not just sitting there, a drooling idiot. But I find that I lose a second, here and there, deciding what to do and what to checkbox. I am simply not quite as fast as I used to be.

The sad thing is watching others succumb to age. We all get older. I remember watching a guy who learned dispatching with me as we brought the club into operations get slower and slower. Eventually, one session, the railroad ground to a halt, every phone to an ear, the DS reading out one warrant when he needed to toss out three. Finally, a young (and new) dispatcher asked if he wanted a break. The older guy just stood up, threw up his hands and said, “It’s yours”. And, matters worse, the kid got the railroad up and running in about fifteen minutes. And, overall, that might not have been the best thing. The older member never dispatched again and eventually left the hobby all-together.

I’ve seen some of our older members really have a hard time with simply navigating a layout. Even running through trains, they screw up. At a recent session where the host invited our club to come run, I gave a guy a warrant to a location. Another train was waiting for him there. Anyway, he ran past the train, past the fouling point, over the turnout, dragging three cars onto the ground. Then, instead of advising the DS as to the situation, or rerailing the cars, he simply tried to back up to fix the problem. And, as expected, the derailed cars buckled, knocking the other train over and making a total mess of things. I remember the host tossing a look at me, and me blushing – I’d talked my crew up and now this?

For compromised operators, we can still work around it. When I read a warrant, I make sure they understand exactly what I’m telling them to do. Usually, the best way is for me to read the warrant, then to read back, then add (post-warrant), “Okay, you are going to Red Rock Siding. You should see John there.” Another trick is to give them a conductor to help (a sort of service-engineer). That works too.

But worst is a former friend of mine with anger problems. These issues arouse (best guess and, no, I’m not a doctor) from some medical emergencies he suffered a few years back. Once he was out of the hospital, everything seemed fine. But then his temper started to trip him up. At best, he’d contain it to muttering curses about minor equipment issues (having hosted him on my own Tuscarora, it annoyed me to hear him criticizing my equipment right in front of me). Gradually all the area layouts across the eastern side of the state closed their doors on him. Worse, the anger become even more pronounced. He was suspended from the club once, and on his return got kicked out again. People who know him are blocking his number on their phones. He’s getting shut out.

Remember what I said in my last On-Sheet about how the host might view a chatterbox? Well, it’s worse for toxic operators. A chatterbox is amusing. A bitchwit is a liability, one that might lose operators who don’t wish to deal with it. Like a gangrened limb, about all you can do is remove it.

Fortunately, we are getting a lot of younger members, with is gratifying (even though they come with their own issues, such as short attention spans, disinterest in history and little in the way of modeling skills) But I can work with (and around) that. As long as they don’t complain…

>>>BUY A BOOK!<<< 

The old codger sleeps (in a recent debrief)