retty simple one for today. Got an invite from Tom Wilson to run on his enjoyable Pittsburgh & West Virginia, a sprawling steel mill run with lots of outlying coal mines and some connecting lines (Union RR) that I still don’t think I understand. Happily, he finally corrected his railroad to be geographically correct (with East and West on the right ends) and screw the magnetic board (which I never use (and which he forgot to set out for me)). So he invited a bunch of other retirees (which speaks well about retirement) and a couple of out-of-town visitors for a rainy Wednesday session. Of course, to the surprise of no one, I dispatched.

The session went well enough, probably better than I could expect.  While I was in the back bedroom, I did have a phone but no intercom. Okay, so that sucked – I could only receive calls but couldn’t scream threats or insults. And the crews (with a couple of exceptions) did not call in to mark themselves off the main (either at final destinations or interim yards). This, coupled with the aforementioned non-intercom, made it tough to run the layout. I’d try to even things up by assigning the warrant checkbox for “Not in effect until” so new crews would have to go find these missing trains, but they’d retaliate by (I suspect) not really checking and just going. Also, nobody seemed concerned about which track was the main and which was the siding, making for some very casual (and dangerous) meets.

Later that night (after the session ended, I raced back into town for a train club board meeting and a clinic on TT&TO in the back office (which I gave – whew, full day), I went home, slumped on the sofa and watched an old favorite anime, Haikyuu. I was struck by the parallels – in this series, a young kid who desperately wants to play high school volleyball puts together a team of misfits, anyone he can find. In their first and only game, they are blown out by the opposing team. And during the game, he develops an animosity for the other team’s setter, who is a total pain in the ass to his own team. Well, everyone moves up to high school and, surprise, they find themselves on the same team. But, man, I don’t even like volleyball but I love this series.

Where am I going with this? Sometimes I think how easy my life would have been if there had been some sixty-six year old guy who knew all about model railroad ops and could have introduced me to them and taught me all the methods and positions. But in the early nineties, there were only a couple of circle-jerk clubs and no ops. I built a layout and finally got something vaugly like ops going (I cringe when I think about how silly it all was). But with the help of a former member, Bob Martin, we actually started doing railroad things using railroad methods and slowly came up with a host of operators who are rather well-regarded by the layout hosts of Florida. A lot of these guys will call us if they need a dispatcher or a couple of guys. We have thirty or so operators now, and a lot of us can run under any methodology, from TT&TO to CTC. I’m pretty proud of the group, and it only takes dispatching with a scratch team to make it more evident. Especially some of the things I saw go on around Bridgeville last night. I don’t want to go into details – but delays in that town were so significant that the yardmaster (or “mistress”) was complaining to me that she wasn’t getting any traffic. I really missed my boys when I found the “tangle it up on the ground” situation that was going on.

Maybe I can talk Tom into hosting ONT for a session. We’ll show them how the railroad runs!

Anyway, thanks to Tom for letting me come out and for correcting the orientation on his line. It really made a difference for me.

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