as shaping up to be a good night. Came in and the lot was filling in front of the clubhouse. Everyone cleaned. We had all sorts of improvements ready to try. A bunch of new people upshifted their jobs to more difficult ones. The crewcall sheet filled up. I set up in the office, got everything running, and we were off.

A good flow. The Harris Glen summit was packed and along the river route, a general freight, a passenger train and a coal drag chased each other along the winding route. The newbies picked up the warrants pretty well and were holding their own. Good session…

Matthew came back – it’s his last run before heading off to university. I even managed to cut him a final hyperspace warrant for the run into Cincinnati. Once he finished, he came in and offered to take the panel. Fine, I could jump on that last freight. Helped a young guy get his train out of the yard after reviewing his switching instructions. Hooked my own lashup on and eased out of the yard. And bang – a quarter of the layout from Calypso to Hellertown went down.

We all worked on it for a while. Tried this. Tried that. Cut out the steel mill. Looked over the new end of the yard. The thing was – it was hard to point at anything – we’d gotten something like six-eight trains through that area without a single fault. And now this. Dead as a doornail.

Frank, myself and several others stayed a little late looking things over. The problem seems to either be the Calypso booster or the loconet though that area. We found as we cut it off, the system would come up. Plug it in and down it would go. We traced this weird trick all the way to to Champion Mine before we ran out of time.

We’ve had one session end prematurely before, and that was someone working on a live track in the office with a metal coupler gauge. Outside of that, this is the first time in two decades of ops that we DNFed. I can only be honest and say that was a disappointment. So apologies to the crews who took it in stride. I’m just annoyed that so many people were having fun when the system went down.

We’ll continue to work this until we figure which component failed. Next month folks…!

>>>IF YOU ARE EVER ON A TRAIN THAT COMES TO A STOP AND WILL NOT PROCEED, MAKE SURE YOU HAVE A GOOD BOOK. LIKE MINE. GET GREAT HISTORICAL FICTION HERE!<<<