his wasn’t my best idea – going over to Polk City to run the Virginia Southwestern when I also had a Saturday Night Ops session at the club later. So I’d be dispatching for, let’s see, eight hours (and on the road for three). And all that model railroading and I wouldn’t touch a throttle. Still, I do enjoy dispatching.

We approached the VSW with the same caution that sappers would an unexploded bomb. Last time on this railroad, everything blew up and the session ended with a critical staging area dead. The only reason we were able to run was that our host had luckily managed to find a pile of chips from the older system he uses to bring his railroad back online (according to him, the guy who sold it collected the lot from four of his friends and had been considering trashing it all when John contacted him). So the railroad was up, the dodgy CTC panel was running, and Zach and I took our seats, he as the Southern Dispatcher, me as the busier L&N. I’d also run the CTC since I was familiar with the railroad and the panel itself. And so we kicked off the session.

I was writing warrants about two times the volume that Zach was getting out (that’s expected, given each railroad’s traffic levels). But Zach kept up with the workload even as he became comfortable with train sheets (which he’s used (sorta) on the Tuscarora Branch Line). He was furthered hampered by the Interstate RR local, who was rolling all over his rails at busy Hawthorn Jct without a by-your-leave. Sometimes I’m a bit dumbstruck by people who should know better but don’t act that way – kinda like people driving in rain without headlights. Zach did the best he could working around the guy.

But for me, it wasn’t anything I hadn’t seen before. Against the owner’s wishes (what does he know?) we found that the sometimes-fussy CTC board was working just fine and that meant we could use the Goodbee area like a real railroad would. To describe it, let me use a picture instead of thousand words.

So North is to the left, South to the right. The “shared” trackage is owned by the L&N, so Southern has to ask politely to cross it (they come in and out on the green segments). And this is what is called a lap siding, where two shorter sidings are overlapped so you can use them as two shorter sidings or one long one. The top one is Goodbee, the bottom one is Bluejay. It is under CTC control, which can be temperamental but was mostly fine.

They way John (and dispatchers lessor than Zach and myself) use it is to pre-set the turnouts and only throw the two to the left (north), turning the entire thing into a sorta perverse double-track section. Me, I don’t like that – if you have speed reductions for siding turnouts, you’ll be crawling at 5 to 10 mph through the whole section. No, I try to align for the true main for all trains. You do have the option for using the lap siding as two short sidings or one long one.

The crowning moment of awesome came that afternoon. We’d switched seats and I was on the Southern. Zach was going bonkers with warrant-madness (crews weren’t just picking up the phones and listening to see if he was talking, they’d buzz first, so buzz-buzz-buzz). But he coped.

Anyway, we had a number of trains approaching this area. Had one Southern train coming north (the right-side green line) stopping just short of the interlocking on the Cawood passing siding. Zach gave me permission (amidst his other distractions) to use the tracks. Our buddy Kyle was towing a long Southern  drag freight south so I aligned him down the “true” main and over to Cawood (with a warrant to take the main there to pass the northbound). Unfortunately Kyle had head-end work there and fouled north onto L&N trackage.

Then I heard Zach giving a warrant for an L&N southbound to run the shared.

“Wait, you gave it to me.” I sputtered.

“I did?”

Yes, my little crews – these are the margins of safety you operate under. Zach hadn’t even heard me ask and was reaching for the phone to call for his crew to hold. I told him I was on it. Praying to the Gods of Interlocking that the CTC board would work, I aligned turnouts to the lower siding (Bluejay) to slip him around Kyle’s caboose. Then Zack and I watched the monitors to see if it would be wreck or reward.

It was really cool. I could see the nose of the northbound Southern just in his siding, and Kyle’s southbound extending onto the main. And the southbound L&N came rolling down through Goodbee, swinging onto the Bluejay siding, down the length of the fouling Southern train, and neatly back onto the L&N mainline. I don’t even know if the engineer realized how cool a move it was – he probably was oblivious. But me, well, for all the sins and foibles of my life, this one went into the plus column.

It was effing beautiful.

Thanks for the session, John. We had a great time!

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