o last week I had RSV (now everyone who knows me and was around me is giving me the stink eye). Felt pretty bad at the high water mark (lung water, that is). So now I’m in the recovery mode but the doctor who saw me in the ER said if I don’t get better in a day or so, I gotta come back to avoid it turning into Pneumonia.

Well, shit.

But I think I developed a sure-fire cure.

• First, go to a doctors clinic (well, Doc Andy is a veterinarian, but a damn good one).
• Makes sure it has a huge model railroad in the back room. One that hosts ops.
• Wear a mask. Because, for the holiday session, the attendance doubled – we had sixteen or seventeen guys there.
  
• Dispatch. If anything will take your mind off your aliments, it’s managing a train flow on a crazy-busy line.
• Use lousy radios. You’ll have to scream over the line to be heard, airing out your lungs.

Amtrak 22, identified by its number boards (or is that “number tape”) glides on the main past Hinkle Yard (Photo: John DV)

Oddly, while I was climbing out of the rubble after the session (we actually ran everything, pretty much in the fast twenty-four hours), I realized I felt a lot better. Not cured, but better.

It really was quite a session. To start things off, the fast clock jumped an hour forward (daylight savings time at railroad midnight?). Suddenly several trains were late and came boiling out of Portland and Spokane, meaning the starters hadn’t gotten the first meets done found others riding their butts. A critical siding was out of actual when long trains were looming on top of each other, needing passing room. I think one of those sawdust-worms (there is one on the Attalia Mill shavings pile, and scale, it’s about fifteen feet long) came down and ate the switch crew – the only plausible explanation. Some of the trains had problems (that’s always an N-scale operations thing) meaning trains got more delayed and more bunched.

Zach even had to step in and save me. I nearly sent a unit train into Hinkle Yard that was supposed to stay on the high iron. While that didn’t free up anything, it was good to have an extra set of eyes in the room. And ears. As my radio got worse, he would relay messages to reclusive engineers, getting answers for me. Since he’s dispatched this road before, he knows how difficult it can be. It incinerates lesser dispatchers. So thanks for the assist.

A tank train passes an Amtrak. There is a real chance here of “Bonfire of the Varnishes” (Photo: John DV)

Worst moment for me was in the dance of death around Pasco Yard, when a crew was ordered to come out of Spokane and bipass it. They reported past the lead, then changed their OS to say they had made a mistake and were still miles away. So I tried to pop a bottlenecking train out of Pasco and run him lickety-split to Cheney. But wait, no, the exiting engineer had headlights – the lost train was actually think-I-can-cornfielding his way towards the exiting train. I had to go back on the railroad and tell everyone near the Pasco-Chaney demilitarized zone to stop-stop-stop. Yes, a very humiliating thing for any dispatcher.

This gives you an idea of the crowd. It was wall-to-wall-train-geeks for hours (Photo: Zack B)

But the crews kept at their posts, crowded into that room like rats in a bucket. They kept their cool with the press of bodies, the racket from the radio, the waits for other trains and the cab-jumping. But we got everyone through without too much damage, and that ones on the boys – I just hog-called the session.

Actually, as the session was winding down, I took a moment to look over the timetable and laugh. I love good comedic fiction. You want to get a good laugh out of God? Show him your timetable.

I even remembered to keep track of the two remote operators, who sit in the other room and run their trains on engine-mounted and wall-propped cameras. While they get a nice view, I have to ask operators to give their stalled engines pushes, to watch to make sure they don’t uncouple, and to throw switches for them. The operators at the session really came in for this, keeping those two blind mice moving. I tried to minimize the helping hands by keeping the drones on the mainline as much as possible.

So it was quite the session, a lot of fun. I know seventeen guys who will be getting toys in their stockings for being good boys. Thanks, fellas, for getting us through this.

>>>IF YOU REALLY RUSH IT, THERE IS STILL TIME TO ORDER A BOOK FOR CHRISTMAS. MAYBE<<<

Session end. Every train in the Spokane Yard are kissing the bumpers (Photo: Leonard J)

Andy checks his drone operators for pulses. We can’t hear shit on the radios but man, we can see forever (Photo: Chris S)

The photographer noted that the elves in the caboose are delivering coal to all the bad children. Coal dug out of old uranium mines. Very bad children. (Photo: Chris S)