operations

December 5, 2022

OpsLog – FEC – 12/4/2022

he second day of my all-ops weekend played out even better than I could have hoped for. The drive was easy, traffic light. We met a couple of club members at Wendy’s before the session, to chat about the coming effort (one of the members for a newbie, so that helped him (or filled him with horrifying regrets)). And then we went over, met the rest of the bunch and filed out to the two sheds to get things rolling. Kyle was on the panel and I had light road duties, meaning with one train, I stripped out every car […]
December 9, 2022

On Sheet – YardBirds

ur club has been developing ops for two decades. We’ve also gone through three freight routing systems. Right now we’re very happy with disposable waybills. We also only had one yard (Martin). It’s a staffed yard with a crew. There is another yard on the other side of the hill, Calypso. It had nothing going on and is unstaffed. So for the last ten years, there has been a cut of thirty cars in both yards. As inbound trains from staging come into the yards, they stop at the first yard, add a cut of ten cars (we call these […]
December 14, 2022

OpsLog – TBL – 12/13/2022

o we had ordered supplies for Wensleydale Feed and Grain (namely 4000 cattle bibs). The Chesapeake and Ohio shipped it to our hometown – Tuscarora – via the Pennsy. I spotted them dropping it on the team track siding as I drove home from the bar, right as promised, midnight. I’d be there with the boys to unload it the next day. So we had the door open and the truck backed up at 8am sharp. With donuts, coffee and fish stories, they boys didn’t really get working until 8:45. We’d only just gotten everyone aboard and ready to grunt […]
December 18, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 12/17/2022

he engineer on train 244 curses under his breath as he ground his units up the long hill towards Harris Glen. For no reason at all – except to be ornery  – the dispatcher had issued a train order for 244 to meet 247 at the base of the grade – Pittsburgh – rather than midway up as timetabled. It would have been an easy meet but for management sticking its long nose into train-running business. So now 244 was late, and that meant that, given the hard meets the railroad was running, passenger 97 would be dawdling at Lehigh, […]
December 29, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 12/28/2022

ot my last session of the old year, but damn close. And I’m happy to say I didn’t send out this year with a bang (of trains hitting each other – hard). But it was a rough night, rough enough that when I finally ran the last freight train myself and then ejected the carbon-dioxide club into the cold at 11pm, I went home, had a beer, binge-snacked and watched anime. No more trains for now. We got everything running okay but I made an honest-to-dispatcher mistake early – had a passenger train with orders to meet a local, but […]
January 22, 2023

OpsLog – TBL – 1/21/2023

fter a long weekend at a train convention (and two weeks of ensuing covid isolation) I was able to return to duty on the Tuscarora. The railroad surgeon cleared me for service. And back I went to the dispatcher’s desk. Also on duty was Kyle (on interlocking), his father Phil (on Scheduled trains) and Greg (on Coal). Yes, so we had a rusty lever-thrower, a rookie on the timetable and a coal guy who forgot how the tally sheet worked. I guess that’s why we ran four hours on the session. Still, Phil (even though he is a model railroader, […]
January 26, 2023

OpsLog – LM&O – 1/26/2023

ourteen and a half hours. A lot can happen in fourteen and a half hours. And this was in 10:1 clock time, so that was (in real time) just under an hour and a half. That’s how long number 902, the Shelfton Local, had to wait to get a warrant from a newbie dispatcher (yeah, Steve H, your humiliation begins. All newly minted DS-Deskers get it). And my order would have been one checkbox. Go to Shelfton. Man, it’s what, four real-feet away? Leave the yard, cross over, go into the cutoff. (And to think – I’m the guy who […]
February 2, 2023

OpsLog – CSX Taft – 2/2/2023

et my friend Chris Strecker for an early morning breakfast, followed by an invite to his house to try operations on his blossoming layout, a simulation of car spotting in Taft Yard in Orlando, Florida (yeah, right down the road). His layout is one of those elegant small layouts (where you aren’t throwing track across a basement). Basically it’s a dogbone with two staging tracks on the back wall and a host of industries along the leading edge. Chris has actually placed a number of real places on his line (and a couple of fictitious ones at well (and who […]
February 23, 2023

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/22/2023

teve Hooper is going to hate reading this, but tonight we ran every train (freights, passengers, and even some units trains and extras) and we ran it pretty much on time. Sorry, Steve. When I took the hot seat tonight, I felt a lot of pressure to get this session down right. After all, the last one was a shambles (sorry again, Steve). We had to show that the entire thing could come together and run like a true railroad. This was doubly important because we were using our new freight flows from Nazareth. Yeah, so, no pressure but it’s […]
February 24, 2023

On Sheet – Tuscarora Realization!

ddest thing. We’ve been running my diminutive Tuscarora Branch Line for two an a half years. Now, this tiny layout runs under Time Table & Train Orders (a method where trains follow their timetables but modify their efforts based on train orders from the dispatcher). Now, I’m not going to say that we’re perfect in our execution of the method – selective compression and all that. But it seemed to work and everyone likes the sessions. Orders got passed. It felt “railroady”. So, here’s the actual track schematic on the west side of the railroad. Westly is the coal mine (and while […]