Ops session 25

 

Tim is pulling the pins while conductor John Barry looks on. Meanwhile,
Paul Dolkps tends to his engine.

Five brave operators worked the Aquia Line today for Ops Session 25. We ran one 2-man crew of John Steitz and Amby Nangeroni, and a 3-man crew of Paul Dolkos, John Barry and Tim Tilson. 

This was Tim's  first time operating and he did great. He has nice HO layout depicting the Soo Line in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Tim is also heavily into wargaming. He has written several scenario books for the wargaming hobby.

This was John Barry's first time back on the layout after a long absence.  He quickly picked up where he left off.  Amby got his first chance to be a conductor. He picked it up quickly. He found a few waybills that did not conform to my new track numbering system. We corrected those on the spot. 

Overall this was one of our better sessions. The biggest issue was that Whiton seemed to lose battery power after the first train. We swapped it out and used Haupt.  

The engineer of Haupt ran into a problem when he tried to run into the passenger stub track without first selecting the polarity switch on the  fascia. This switch exists because of the electro-mechanical peculiarities of the area where three turnouts overlap. To keep the electrical power routing to the frogs simple, I have a manual power route to the frog. I really need to come up with an automatic way of routing power to that switch as many of the crews forget to activate the switch when necessary.

We used the random events cars again. The crews selected 4 of them overall. Three of those were some of the more colorful and dramatic events. The example at the left is one. This was just bad luck as about 50% of the cards have no effect. 

None of the guest operators had an iPhone to use the Blunami, so the Eclipse did not get used. The Blunami can be used with a regular DCC throttle, but I am down to only one functional throttle.

The farm boys in the group suggested some kind of lean-to or shelter for the pig pen. I need to further develop that.

During the Op session I was involved in bidding on a set of O scale machine tools for the future machine shop at Aquia Landing. I actually won the bid though with shipping and tax I probably did not get a good deal. But it was an out of production kit and will help me get the machine shop built a lot quicker compared to scratch building all the tools.  I still need a metal planer. Wild West Scale Models is supposed to be working on one of those, so hopefully it will be out before I need it.