At the throttle

Saw the future today. Wow! Was over at my buddy Steve’s house today, doing a little work on the traveling layout and then getting another test run in on the SP&K. It’s a cool two-deck layout with a lower staging area, a twin helix (up and down) and then and over and back run – basically a great big dogbone (with a section of single track). But the thing is, he’s automated it. We’d run an early practice session a while back (HERE) and found a number of problems with how things worked, all which Steve addressed. For example, instead […]

The reason we run trains is to escape reality. Even though we often push weathered cuts of cars into rusty sidings flanked by shabby industrial buildings, even if the era is the great and deep depression, there is an escapism to operations. I hate when reality follows us into our make-believe world. The recession is hitting the club hard. People have been forced into crummy jobs, night work and such. Others are having to extend services of their businesses to stay afloat. And those with 9-5 jobs are so burned out by the stress of keeping them that they often […]

There were lots of things I could have done Saturday. First off, I was coming off the tail end of a low-grade cold / long workweek, just bone tired and ready to take it easy over the weekend. And there was that new Steven King novel, Under the Dome, which the library just sent. Things are heating up in this corrupt Maine town trapped under a mysterious force field. And there is that Occupy Orlando march going on downtown. Regardless of what you think of them (I’m certainly not a fan of corporate turdworms), it would be an easy bike ride to get […]

The trains are streaming out of Orlando Yard at the start of the session, and then the layout goes down. We all look at each other. The owner starts cycling his system. We all help by checking our trains, making sure we’re not on turnouts, we’re not derailed or shorting in any way. The system comes up – briefly – then goes down again. You hate to see it – owners put a lot of time and energy into setup, and they feel a need to provide a good session. But still, with all the electronics a modern digital command […]

Model railroads are like their real-world counterparts; they can suffer downturns in traffic and business. Last night, our club ops were sparsely attended. Where sometimes we’ll have 20+, maybe upwards of thirty people, this time we only had a dozen. Member’s wives where in recovery, people had to work their crummy recession-desperate jobs, it was summer, something was on the tube, whatever. As a friend told me when he drove in and saw the cars in the parking lot, he thought “Uh oh.” But the layout was clean and we were here and trains were coupled up, so we figured […]

The Stuyvesant Poolsburgh & Kinderhook railroad had its shakedown ops today. It’s a slick space-age layout with optional computer control of trains (in fact, during the session, the RDC line (small interurban transports) ran across their own line and met at the Stuyvesant Central Station). It’s pretty much a passenger effort, lots of station stops, mostly double-tracked main (other than one death-defying tunnel where the line is single track). Train handling is superior to anything I’ve seen in N-scale. Of course, that’s not to say we didn’t have problems (it was a shakedown session, after all). At first, everyone was […]

I start to forget how far the group has come with model railroad ops. Oh, we’re not those super-prototype groups that do everything by the book (that’s what November at Tehachapi will be about). But over the years, everyone has learned to work radios and throttles simultaneously, and to generate more solutions than problems. And with my dispatcher program, I can keep the railroad moving like an air-traffic controller. So just as contrast helps to define, we had a visitor at Doc’s session today, a nice gentleman from England. He’d come to the club last Wednesday and the offer had […]

All operators know this one. Zanesville has a main down the middle, a siding to the left and a parallel industrial track to the right. With the throttle humming in Run 1 under my glove, Train 244 trundles down the main, passing thorough the zebra shadows cast by the Zanesville local parked on the industrial iron. A flash of light off the rails, and here’s 233 tucking into the siding opposite, the brakeman swinging back aboard as it rounds the switch stand. Watching the three trains line up, I hook up a phone. “244 in on the main at Zanesville.” […]

I knew there was trouble when I came into North Platte yard limits with my second local of the day. The first cut was still sitting there, the yard was filling up and the yardmaster was ripping out tufts of hair. Operations, like any other social organizations, can suffer breakdowns. In this case, the owner (a veterinarian) had lost a lot of setup time to clearing his train room of remodeling debris and also got called into two emergency surgeries that morning. Hence, the normal administration sorting had not taken place. The yards began confused and couldn’t catch up. Add […]