Today was another op session, but not so serious. This was an opportunity for friends to get time with the layout and run trains in a relaxed atmosphere, with “training wheels” as requested. A few were first-time visitors, others harkened back to A&O 1.0. We started arriving a bit before 9 AM and ran with a pizza lunch break until about 3 (maybe longer, that’s when I left due to icy roads and snow.)
Kirk “Junior” spent most of the session dispatching.
Well after lunch Craig sat down and started “training” his older brother Mark in the nuances of dispatching. When I “logged off” Mark was flying solo.
Meanwhile Cody waited for the DS to let him back on the mainline after switching interchange cars in Mount Union.
This may be too silly, but when I came around Point Vincent to see a collection of folks at the entrance to the main yards, somehow it seemed like “Washington crossing the Delaware!”
Meanwhile, in Linnwood, the yard was full of traffic for a little while. A N&W GP35 familiar to 1.0 operators runs on the passing while new Also FAs burble two tracks over.
Kirk “the Elder” switches 28 linear feet of International Paper with an SW9 equipped with a Loksound decoder and Tang Band 2008S speaker module.
David conducts a class in unloading live coal loads at the coal at the Whiting Rotaside dumper. This involves coordinated moves of 3 different locomotives, the road engine that brought the loads, an SW9 shoving loads onto the platform, and a second SW9 that trims empties and tacks them onto what was the “nose” of the road engine for a return to Ricksburg.
Rick Bacon and his son Levi brought work-in-progress buildings for downtown Mount Union. Here we see the Union Hall and interior “cassette” illuminated by battery power. They are amazing scratch-built buildings!
Rick brought over a box of blocks to build a retaining wall in Mount Union. These started out as something inexpensive he found at Home Despot, brought home, broke apart into chunks, and painted.
That’s all for now. As near as I could tell, everyone had a lot of fun during a very relaxed day of operations. Towards the end of the day, a lot of folks hit the road due to a snow storm and reports of ice building on the roads this new year’s eve.
