ou know it’s going to be a bad ops night at the club when you get into the lot and there is one car sitting there, all by itself.

You really know it is when that one person tells you that Calypso Yard is dead. No power. No trains can move. Yikes.

Calypso is a collective yard on the eastern approaches to our steep mountain district. Cars from several different lines are gathered here, to be tacked onto westbounders boosted through the high pass. And descending trains do the opposite, dropping cuts to be parceled out to other roads. We form a bridge route through heavy country, and our trains are long. And Calypso is critical on the east slope.

So yeah, it’s dead.

That’s when the guy who has been working on it showed up – Bad Jonathan (we had two of them; you call out and they’d both turn their heads. On the spur of the moment I gave him this prefix to separate him from Good Jonathan, who doesn’t break yards).

So Bad Jonathan worked feverishly as the rest of us cleaned and readied the layout for operations. And the very last moment (I mean, seconds from start) he got it running (so kudos to him for this). The careful instructions I’d prepped, to be given to all crews to bipass Martin-Calypso transfers, went into the trash. The clock went hot. The first train into Calypso reported no problems. Great.

Oh, it was a session like all the rest. The aging turnouts still devil us. At one point (and for no reason) the phones failed. Soon as we got our phone-guy to look at them they came back up. But we ran nearly everything, tried to maintain our schedules and pushed cargos all over the place, so I’ll tip that into the success column. With that done, now I’m off to DixieRails for a weekend of enjoyable ops in Atlanta. Watch this space for details!

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