My First Operating Session

Yesterday the 8th November, I finally hosted my first operating session. It is absolutely unbelievable how well it went! I had a buzz for the remainder of the day and spent a sleepless night thinking of everything I wanted to tackle today to make it even better.

Including myself, there were 5 of us that operated the layout. Kevin (my brother), Peter, Niel and his father Mike.

Niel and myself handled the yard and used coloured tags to place on the cars as they arrived to help classification better. It worked an absolute charm. As a rake of cars arrived, we would place the coloured tags on the roof and then proceed to shunt them into their required blocks. Once finished, we put the car cards together matching the block of cars and then removed the tags ready for the local engines to pick up the block and head out to start shunting.

Mike and Peter, together with Kevin on occasions, ran the mainline trains from staging through to staging. What was really enjoyable was watching everyone run at prototypical speeds. Also there were very few if any derailments. Those derailments that did happen were normally as a result of switches not aligned properly.

Niel took the Essex / East Glacier Park local and shunted both towns like a star. Kevin took the Columbia Falls and West Glacier Park local and I gave him a hand as Break-man. Kevin drove the loco and I told him what to do, as well as throwing switches, uncoupling cars and the like. Kevin actually commented how much better it was as a 2 man crew, which it was. It took a lot of the pressure off having to not only run the train, but also do all the pick ups and set-outs, change switches etc etc.

We all ran off a string diagram schedule I had drawn up. I did not actually convert it into a timetable as I wanted to see if there were any issues before doing additional hard work. I was quite amazed how everyone picked up on it and how easily they were able to read it. However, a proper timetable would have been a great help. That WILL be in place by the next session.

The fast clock was also fantastic. I purchase a 20m VGA monitor extention and ran it from the one area where my laptop was to a second monitor in a strategic position in the room. I ran JMRI's analogue clock and everyone commented how well it worked

The one Fast Clock monitor over East Glacier Park

The 2nd Fast Clock monitor over the helix from Columbia Falls to West Glacier Park

Above is one last photo of the staging yard (Stryker / Browning) during the op session: -

The day chosen, Sunday, turned out to be perfect. Everyone was relaxed and in jovial spirits. The guys arrived at about 09h30 for some coffee and a chat. 09h45 we started with a briefing and started at 10h00. The session was planned to end at 12h30 and we were actually about 5 min behind in the end.

To end off with, we all sat outside with boerworse rolls and cool drinks and had a good chat. Next session is booked for the 20th Dec and so far, everyone has said they will be attending again.

Till next time, and hopefully this time some proper photos of the opp session, keep well and best regards.