t’s getting into the holidays, people are traveling, holding parties and such, so scraping up a session is getting difficult. As it was, the December 20th running of the Farnham’s Florida East Coast was a close-run thing. He got just enough people to run a casual session together – no dispatcher, sorta TT&TO style. The day was nice, we opened the doors and went to work.

My first run was 930, the busy Titusville out-n-back. I really had a good time with this one – it was very overloaded (the Nehi bottling plant had a occupied dock and four cars off-spotted. My train was really long from all the Stanley cars out of City Point. But since traffic was light on the line, I was able to run around and drill out as needed. Still, what a mess that became. I managed to work it out with Ken’s warm support (“Shouldn’t you be gone by now?” “No, Ken, I’m an hour early”).

Next run was the Frontenac coal run, which I did in my own “gifted” way (I now know that I could have just handled both entire cuts as one, instead of doing it in five-car double-sets). Oh well – live and learn.

Last run was an easy petroleum dash that gave me a scenic loop around the line, good to wind down.

Since there were only a couple of us running a light holiday schedule (Doug, Al, Chip, my wife JB and, of course, Ken and Bev) we ran early – meets still being met – and got done early enough for a debrief before JB and I headed out for a Christmas party.

Yeah, sure, usually its great to have a real busy session with trains making meet after meet, and sometimes a bit of casual switching and some running with only one eye to the clock (rather than two) is great, too. So we had a very nice session which put a real smile on my face.

And my FEC train shirt started a couple of comments at the party. I was even wearing my seniority pins.

>>>BUY A BOOK. I SOLD TWO AT THE PARTY!<<<