Dual Op Sessions (11th on PoLA and 3rd On Aquia)

Brad and Paul are all business on PoLA

Ed and Eric spotting cars left from train 5 at Falmouth

The Aquia Line and PoLA layouts hosted dual (dueling?) ops sessions today. Paul Dolkos and Brad Trencamp ran PoLA. That was the 11th session on PoLA.

 Meanwhile, four newcomers ran the Aquia Line for its third session. Eric Payne and Ed Kapuscinski took Train 8 out of Falmouth. But first they had to spot the cars that train 5 had left there.  At the other end of the layout, Bob Sprague and Scott Wahl ran Train 7 out of Aquia Landing.  Ed, Eric and Scott are N Scale modelers. Bob, Brad and Paul have HO layouts. Eric's N Scale  layout uses TT&TO, so he was able to jump right in to the ops scheme. Ed models Conrail in the York PA area.  Scott builds modules and has a N Scale home layout. Bob is building a new Ma and Pa layout in HO scale.

Cornfield meet at Potomac Creek Bridge?

Scott and Eric sort out who will get to go first

The General rides the Special to Aquia Landing

Train 8 was late leaving as they had a lot of switching to do at Falmouth. Meanwhile, Bob, the conductor on Train 7, was waiting at Brooke. He realized that 8 was late, so he advanced from Brooke, his scheduled meeting point, IAW a special rule on the Time Table, which is verbatim copy of an actual rule used by the USMRR.

Unfortunately,  Eric, the conductor on 8, thought they could work Potomac Creek before 7 arrived. Meanwhile 7 was barreling down on them. Luckily they were able to stop on the bridge before crashing,  where they sorted out the meet. After some arm wrestling, Train 8 ended up backing up to Stoneman's to let 7 pass (7 was the superior train). You got to love TT&TOs.

Eric and Ed also got to use the working brakes on a car spotted at Potomac Creek.

Meanwhile, Paul and Brad got their work done on PoLA in about 1.5 hours. They were the first operators to spot the newly weathered auto-racks at Chase Marine Terminal for use by the US Army to take wheeled vehicles being unloaded from the ship. Afterwards, Brad showed Paul and I his design ideas for his new basement, a beautiful 12 by 34-ft space with room for staging in a adjoining utility room. Then Paul took off for home, while Brad stayed around to watch the rest of the session.

Scott and Bob switching the wharf at Aquia Landing

The crews on the Aquia Line were busy switching and doing a great job. Since they were such good operators, we decided to have Brad run the Generals' Special from Falmouth to Aquia.  It was simply a light engine, Osceola, with the general riding aboard. It got priority on the road. Fortunately, it did not disrupt operations too much, as both 9 and 10  were  waiting for  their scheduled time to leave, so the General's Special had a clear shot at Aquia Landing.

This was the smoothest op session yet. The new link design seemed to work quite well. The new way bill system also worked well. I  modified it a bit so that each car now has a car card that fits in a small plastic pocket. The waybill is a separate slip that also fits in the pocket. The waybill stays with the load, while the sleeve with car card stays with the car. No more tokens. An empty car has no waybill in the sleeve, a very intuitive system.

Two-part waybills in plastic sleeves on the left. On the right is the telegraph message Train 9 received to clear up the line for the General's Special.

I also swapped out some stock coupler's (McHenrys?) from some Atlas HO scale tank cars that drove Paul crazy. I also used JMRI to lower the volume on engine 30, though Decoder Pro was buggy in the process (but no this will not be another DCC rant!) Paul has complained about  both these issues before, so I finally took action.

I learned that I need to get another throttle for the Easy DCC system. I have two now, but will need a third for full ops. Also, we learned that 6 people plus me roving around is a good number for an ops sessions and for the basement in general.  It's not too crowded, and everyone gets to stay busy.

The commissary (my mom) provide some delicious three-layer Venetian cookies for snacks.

All it all it was a very satisfying day. Both op sessions went well. All the crews really did a great job.   Op sessions really make the layout come alive.  As I add cars to the Aquia Line and features (such as the General Special), the operations are proving quite interesting and rewarding.