‘ve always known this was going to happen. A model railroad operations host’s worst nightmare. Came into the club parking lot today and there were only a small number of cars.

Yeah, not enough operators.

The club has been going through changes, namely painting the floors which took things down for over a month. Now interest has cooled. And for whatever reasons, a lot of our solid operators skipped the session.

So, I managed to fill out the locals (myself, a member who’d never done it before, and a visitor with balls). The through freights I gave to new members, Even our helper engineer got bumped up to road freights. A guy who has never run the yard under the new system found himself in Martin. Some other visitors were handed throttles and pressed into service. Everyone was facing the paperwork for the first time, so I had to go over it a dozen times. But we got everything sorted and fired up the clock and off we went.

Not too bad, either.

Oh, there were cars that went to wrong places (I knew that three-car freight train looked suspiciously short). And I know (mathematically and program-logically) that there is at least one misrouted car in the Calypso cuts. But overall, it was a good session. We actually ran all the freights, with me taking one of the last ones and Jeff heroically stepping up to run the other. So we’re good.

At least I think we’re good. Next week Bruce and I will walk the cuts and set up for the next session. Then we’ll see how good my railroad paperwork crash-course really worked!

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