ears back, I used to ride by bike over to Dick Sturm’s house to either work on his layout or run ops. It wasn’t a long ride, about two miles if that, but it was nice to ride home on cold winter nights after playing with trains.

Anyway, wiggled an invite with the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders for a Saturday session and decided to ride over – this time the ride was seven and change, with the worst part on their end (a quarter mile on Aloma sidewalks, with all sorts of traffic. Anyway, made it there safely and they were good enough to let me store my bike in their cattle pen out back.

But to heck with all this scene-setting. Let’s get down to the event.

While these guys are newbies and have scraped together only a handful of sessions, every session shows positive improvements. Unlike some lines where you suffer the same ass-pains under the same unchanging management, their club has been making things better with every session. This time they actually used a system-diagram (left to right, rather than a true map of the railroad), making it obvious to the dispatcher where everyone is. Also, they are using colored tape (rather than traditional roof markers) to work some of their industries (we still have some places that need rail service, and can’t wait for that to someday come online). And the crews are getting more comfortable with warrants – they come a little quicker and make more sense.

Four trains meet at parallel mains. Kyle and my hoppers are front and center.

That’s not to say that they aren’t still goofing up from time to time. I had to jump out of the cab before a collision when a hogger who didn’t note his warrant was to a siding, and not the main where I was lulling, nearly plowed me. And I saw a crew that didn’t know the actual route and almost took a crossover which would have wormholed him across the division. But hey, that’s small potatoes – the LM&O has some colossal lap orders on our line, so OSMR has a ways to go in that regard.

Anyway, a couple of the club members showed up for this – I ran coal opposite Kyle, who ran empty air in counterpoint. And Pete, drugged out of his gourd, ran his Amtrak at speeds which brought back memories of the pace of some of the G-scale clubs at our recent Deland experience. But overall, it was a great time and we (the staff of the Blogatorium) see great promise with this railroad. Hopefully they will continue to host and get even better.

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All photos credited to Kyle S

A MT coal move enters Avey, following the graceful river.