Monday, September 21, 2015

Operating Session #4 - September 12, 2005

Would you believe we ran a full freight schedule in under 4 hours without the regular yard guy present! What a crew! Tim (Model Railcast guy) couldn't make it due to extended family medical issues so Larry (Blazeman) joined Gene (epumph), Bob (Ntrainz1), and me for our 4th op session on September 12th. Bob did an outstanding job covering the yard and Gene broke in Larry on the Red Oak tower runs (can't block the road crossings during switching, can't put the engine on the coal trestle, can't .....).

This week we concentrated on moving freight (what are we delivering?; where are we delivering it?) as opposed to just running trains and much to our surprise more trains got run than usual.

Gene (epumph) arrived at our last op session with his homework done: Brown tower in Camden. I wanted all the guys to have "skin" in the layout so I gave them all "homework" at the end of the previous Op Session. Bob (Ntrainz) did a beautiful job re-letterering my RDCs for the PRSL and Tim and Gene got Atlas tower kits. Here's Gene's which is now faithfully guarding the entrance(/exit) to the Camden Pavonia Yard. (Tim has an incomplete.)



So far the only problems I detected from the last session were:
  • 2 cars in the outbound Merchandise Transfer that need to stay in the yard for on-line deliveries.
  • 1 car card in the yard belonging to a box car that never got picked up in Woodbury and
  • the Baldwin VO-1000  yard switcher found in staging on the point of the tank sweeper train!
Prior to the session I got the Camden Engine Terminal coaling tower dirtied up. (See the August 1, 2015 post)

My humor occasionally trickles into the waybills. This waybill was their favorite for the weekend:

The actor, Bruce Willis, is actually from Penns Grove which is just off the end of my line and he does specialize in body parts so I thought this was an appropriate industry to model for him!