eally, it was a terrible solo effort on the Tuscarora today.

I didn’t have ANY tower malfunctions. And I didn’t have ANY derailments.

Horrible.

See, I figured that before I worked scenery (and since I had an entire Saturday afternoon at the club) I’d run lever testing and try to get it to fail. After about twenty fruitless minutes of this, I figured I should just run a session. At first I was just going to randomize cars but then I found an unused switchlist in the back and made it into an honest to goodness session.

And I ran the whole thing without an issue. Sometimes the world just won’t cooperate, you know.

Tuscarora Local 2 idles on the main just over the fence from Lowery Brickyard. (Photo: Pete F)

Anyway, it was fun drilling for about ninety minutes (the amount of time it takes me to run the full day without coal, dispatchers or anything else in the way). In fact, the only mistake I did (other than a bunch of fault messages because I am still out of practice with the tower) was after I ran the last train, EM-2, the PeeDee. I swept up all the cars, did a nice run-around to put them all way, then backed the engine on to the cut to end the session. Blinked. There were only five cars in my consist. Looked around and realized that the covered hopper was still inside the brewery. You know, I had been over in the outer industrial area and had to pick up both the gondola from the scrap yard and the hopper from the brewery. Even figured the move. But I must have accidentally skipped it. Looks like we’ll need to assign tomorrow’s TE-1 to pick it up. My bad.

Anyway, probably in the latter half of January we’ll try for a hold-your-breath session, where we set up a full run with 4-5 guys and hope my luck holds. We’ll see.

This layout is going to make me prematurely old, or older. Whatever.

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