ou might remember our last jaunt on the FEC which ended prematurely (possibly due to your author bumping a scrap piece of rail down into the electronic guts of the Farnham Calculation Engine). The superintendent decided that this session would be finished with the same cast of characters that smoked his railroad the month before. So, no crew call, more like a summons. We all returned to the scene of the crime where we were all given our jobs from the precise moment we’d gone dark. Everything was as it was.

I slid into the dispatchers chair, looked at all those marooned trains, got my paperwork in order, and then the clock was running and we were off.

One thing – the superintendent was not about to make this an easy baby session. We ran twice the orange and coal loads as a normal session. The limestone was getting shipped to the crushers. The icehouses were served. The industrial sidings were worked. It was busy – busier than I’d ever seen it. And we had a good crew on the line, no novices.

We had some problems, both with delaying movements and yard issues. Everything got behind. The railroad started to back up. Eventually we got our shit straight and started pushing miles. Crews worked together on the ground to resolve issues. The yard started moving trains up for deployment. I focused on moving trains north and south. With an hour to go, I realized we’d all gotten the railroad back on its legs and was now running nearly two hours ahead. Of course, this isn’t the nature of railroads and especially not op sessions so I dropped the rods and slowed down the movements. In the end, we got all the trains to their session endpoints. Nothing caught fire. No fistfights erupted.

Yeah, a good day railroading.

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