nother day on the Wazu. Came in and the host was a bit freaked – worried that we wouldn’t have enough people (it’s vacation season and a lot of people are traveling) (and Doc always freaks, anyway). But there was the discord network teletyping calls for crews and we got about two or three guys in that way. We weren’t at full staff but close enough to make it work.

The session started off in the usual shit-show. I was manning the desk in the back, hunched over my train board and ignoring my monitors (I don’t want to see videos of trains – I need to hear the crews call in). But after being told how critical the timetable was to follow the meets, the first train went out right on time, the second train was ten minutes late, and the third train dragging out seventy minutes behind the advertised. I quickly realized that running the railroad’s “script” wasn’t going to work so we went with plan B (winging it and pulling off meets when they occurred). If we’re going to pretend we are running a modern CTC railroad, I’m going to flex the crap out of it.

High speed railroading on modern rail lines. Here, the evening stack train flies by an army movement switching out Umatilla (Photo: Dan L)

Kicked the railroad’s ass today. (Photo: John C)

A note on dispatching – a while back, I wrote about DIS-FASTER dispatching. In it, you only tell the reporting crews one of two things, either (a) who they are waiting for or (b) go to a new location. The point is, with true warrants you can write orders for the future (using “not in effect orders” to project to execute when conditions are met). With the WAZU, the radio is in constant use and you don’t have time to predict where people will be. No, I run this railroad “in the moment”. Any orders to move are expected to be acted upon as soon as the slack goes out. And, not meaning to brag but clearly doing it, I moved trains sixty to ninety minutes ahead of their timetables. Bad, yes, but only if we are running the archaic TT&TO. Secretly, owners hate to see their cute timetables ignored and always scream bloody murder. But, yes, it’s CTC. Get out of my way.

Overall, I was really happy with how things came out. Nobody waited any unreasonable time for an order (well, Greg waited an hour for a four-trains-by at Biggs Jct (that that involved a a wifi failure and the fact that he was running that silly remote way and like an invalid in a deathbed he had to yell into the room for turnouts to be thrown). But yes, we got him over the line quickly, regardless of his gripes.

An actual Southern Pacific Schedule from in 1980s. See, you doo-doo head!

In the debrief, someone mentioned a good point. The train sheets were copied directly out of the timetable. The problem is that some read down, some read up, but all the additional notes to the side are read down. Seems like a silly thing but really, in the confusion of ops, you don’t have time to look up and down your clipboarded train information for where you should be and what you should be doing. I tried to explain to the owner that what he’s trying to simulate was called a “Schedule” on the SP. Derived from the timetable, it shows a “slice of life” for the one train concerned. And it looks like the image to the right. As noted, I laid out my case succinctly. Doc called me a doo-doo head. Such ingratitude after I made your layout dance.

Anyway, it was still a good time, even without management getting in the way. We all had good runs, good fun, and pizza. What’s not to like.

Thanks for having us, Doc. And let me see if I can create some “real” paperwork for your crews.

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The Lumberjack, on the short-staff list, finally gets out right before midnight (Photo: Dan L)