a-ha, you fool! You fell victim to one of the classic blunders! The most famous of which is “never get involved in a land war in Asia”, but only slightly less well-known is this: “Never dispatch a high-speed rail line using train sheets when death is on the line!”

Or something like that.

So I made the second blunder. You see, a train sheet (as shown below) is like a blank timetable. The dispatcher writes times as trains pass point, draws arrows to where they are cleared to. Also, and this is me, I’ll circle my meet points so I can be sure I made them. It’s how railroads were controlled for a century.

But let’s face it, on the LM&O, we’ll write over a hundred warrants a night. The magnetic board and the computer both do a good job of letting the DS update his trains fast. The train sheet works if you are running real time (or close to it) and have time to develop your situation. I did not. So about ten minutes in, I realized that if we weren’t running a vacation-time low volume session (and had everything on the board) I’d have sunk. Bubble-bubble-glub. It was just too much to write warrants (as I was dictating them) and then check the sheets for conflicts and updating it. I was loosing 5-10 seconds per warrant. And in our sessions that counts for 8 to 16 minutes of lost time. I simply can’t afford this. So yes, we’ll do it in Saturday Night TT&TO sessions, but not the club monthlies.

One of my two sheets. I was sheet-out-of-luck doing this method at this pace (Photo: John C)

On the good side, we really ran well with the folks we had. New people jumped in and tried trains they hadn’t before. I was really happy to see Patrick run the 66/68 set ahead of time (he was the only passenger train of the night). Most of the minerals and almost all mill jobs were run. And it was great to see the “standby” method (where the dispatcher notes your call and asks you to standby offline while writing your train number down for a later call). That worked well.

The yard (with Jeff and Zach) really worked well with the new track arrangement. The straight-in approach keeps all the trains from running the ladder to get in. Further, it means that (on the west side) trains can come and go without fouling each other. Having the locals sort before they returned also helped – we’re going to extend this to cars coming in from Cincinnati and Bound Brook, and maybe even the Calypso cars. If every move is a minute then that’s ten minutes saved of yard-shuffle time (at minimum). Anyone who’s ever indexed cars (either on Tuscarora or elsewhere) knows the annoyance those even-odd-even-odd strings can be. So yes, that’s one to the plus.

271 isn’t highballing out of the yard, not yet, not until his caboose clears the limit sign. (Photo: Alex B)

Oh, the humanity… (Photo: John DV)

I have to give kudos and condolences to Bob K, whose engines went into the drink below Harris Glen. I kinda know (after the fact) what happened and it might have been avoided. The important thing – he’d just watched a couple of engines deep-six on the concrete and I was nagging him on the phone over his delay (I had a train in Weirton waiting to meet him). I think I bugged him twice (I didn’t know what was going on). He could have yelled at me to stop nagging but he remained composed and just swapped out engines, cool under fire. And that’s a good example of what a real operator is like.

An eastbound intermodal meets a westbound freight at Red Rock, the town shaking at the massive forces at play (Photo: Jack H)

A note for the crews. Even though I get you to a spot where you have work, your just being there is not rights to do your switching all over the place. Yes, you could flag and move about, but that’s technically working on track you don’t have access to. If something goes wrong (a train misses your flag and collides with you, you run a turnout, you buckle a rail) then you’ll be having to argue with corporate and federal investigators why you were out there in the first place. A warrant to “work all tracks” is better protection for you and your crew – it means the dispatcher is aware you are working and has approved your work.

And second, if you don’t need flags, I won’t order them out. Sending flags out is an extra ten minutes of time spent waiting for the guy to trudge out and then meander back. If I don’t have trains for a while, then there’s no reason to flag out.

And in the busy, noisy club layout, we probably don’t want to actually put things on the rails as “flagmen”. Visibility is always tough with people taking pictures, getting in the way and all the other distractions. If you are flagging, then you have to work as your engineer and brakeman – you need to keep one eye out for any trains and advise the approaching engineer that you have flags.

For my part, I’ll be a little more specific about who you are flagging against. If I can, I’ll order something like “Flag east against 68 and 298” – that would mean that once you’ve warned those trains, you can bring your flagmen in and not worry about any other trains.

Xtra 702, the Juice, meets a freight in Pittsburgh while Shelfon Local works the lower industries (photo: John DV)

Overall, we did have a very successful session. Everyone seemed cool and it looked like there was a lot of fun going on. The critical jobs got done. We tried new things and were mostly successful (though I’m done with that sheet). And a couple of missing members came back in and contributed.

Now, if someone between our session could move that ore into the mill as a post-ops effort, we’ll be all set for next month. Hint hint.

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Every session, one location is the key. On this night it was Pittsburgh where train passed train (passed train). (Photo: John DV)

Old meets new as fifties first-gens pass a nuke plant (Photo: John C)