At the throttle

ow much fun can a train show be when it starts with you sitting in your car in an empty fairgrounds in the pre-dawn dark, feeling a kidney stone grinding through your guts and hoping ferchristsakes that that pain pill is going to kick in and theburning agony will end? Well, quite a lot of fun, it seems. Set up had solid attendance – lots of membership showed up and the layout went up nice and easy. We had eighteen feet of new scenery, mostly forested but with some scratch built structures (some even showing up the day of the […]

sually this set of SP black widow F’s is on the point of 373 and 374, the intermodal service from Watsonville to San Luis Obispo. They’ve run up and down that route for years. But today I put them on the Zanesville local, running through the Pennsy highlands, working a cut from Martin Yard to Carbon Hill and back (with most of its work in Zanesville). So, yeah, out of place a bit. But fun. I sorted out the cuts on the lead track to the auto plant, and worked one side of the line, then the other, nice and […]

‘m on the Denver platform, watching a standard gauge crew drive standard gauge rails through the midst of the Western Bay Railroad’s narrow gauge yard. Wonder if SP will be hiring? Frowning, I’m checking my watch – just got in from another train and am conducting Number 2 back to Alamosa. It’s almost 2pm, the platform is filled with passengers yet the tracks are empty. Where’s our train? My engineer comes up, a guy I’ve never run with but we exchange courtesies and decide who’s going to do what and confirm waterstops and so forth. Out in the yard. I […]

onight was a pretty amazing night at the club, full of all sorts of highs and lows. Route 50 is just a disaster, especially when it rains. It’s like running on a layout with a new dispatcher, everyone waiting for each other. When I finally got out, I saw four cars in the parking lot. Well, this was shaping up to be a disaster. But eventually people trickled in, held up by the road delays. We actually staffed up for a pretty decent session. I gotta say, it all was worth it early on in the session – had 202 […]

t was one of those days… I walk into the session’s crew lounge, the only guy who forgot to wear his new FEC shirt (embroidered!). Everyone else was blue and snazzy. I had an old Daylight shirt on. Strike one! At the panel, the clock is hot. The first train is rolling for Titusville. I checked, double checked, even gave the train a rollby. I was certain I had it routed right out of the yard. Yet it ended up in Palm Bay, not Titusville. Had to back him all the way to the yard and come out the right […]

he Longwood & Sweetwater, always an old favorite that’s been down too long. Ran with a couple of the boys and had a great time. Came to realize two things while switching Altamonte today. See, Altamonte is not for the timid nor the short – you need to get under benchwork to switch it and it requires a long reach. That I’ve got. So I’ve run this one more than just about anyone on the planet. The thing is, I’ve really got it down. I moved the cars in, cut them off on the holding track, methodically plucked the outbounds, […]

hen working a switching puzzle, there comes a tipping point when you go from moving cars this way and that (while holding your breath) to seeing the solution. I clearly remember that moment today while working the Rinker Plant in Eau Gallie. Now I’ve seen ever possible cheat on this, from people using the main as extended storage to people lifting a car from one track to another (sorry, Ken, but some people panic when they deadlock). I’ve done the job once before and the first time was a bit of a snarl. This time I had a better feel […]

eash. Can it be a crazier session? I’m trying to run the panel. Out in the main room, two of my crews are bellowing at each other like a pair of velociraptors in heat (about the Battle of Midway, I think). Of of the locals is solving his switching puzzle the way a computer would do it (trying every possible combination) while the other has been abandoned by its velociraptor engineer. We lost a switch machine early (wait, no we didn’t, wait, yes we did). And sometime during all this nuttiness, I’m supposed to be dispatching. Got the local chip […]

he FEC. Great railroad. The only thing the host, Ken Farnham, could do to make it better is to change the benchwork height. See, Cocoa yard is at a great height to switch, but when it comes to using it for banging your head, it’s just a little too low. I have to lean in to crack myself in the skull, over and over, when I goof up. See, I was running 915, the train that leaves Cocoa and runs down to Buenaventura to do a lot of switching. It’s tricky, the usual balance of pulling stuff out and putting […]

t was quite the night at club ops. We had a lot of people, always thankful of that. For once I wasn’t the dispatcher, just a local running to Zanesville and beyond to Carbon Hill. A good run – engines worked well and I knocked off the switchlist quite orderly. Stuff went where it was supposed to go and I made clean moves for it all. Only surprise – coming back to Zanesville from Carbon Hill – had clearance to work all tracks (since I needed to work Bolton Box, pull a bunch of outbounds off the head-in track for […]