Pictures of today's operating session - the first one I was at, so I'll let jbvb do the explaining.

Today I was a guest operator at Dave Sias' B&M White Mountain Division layout in NH. He runs some of the same equipment as I do, but in a much different setting. We've also made different layout design tradeoffs:

Dave has modeled most of the important stations (7 total) on about 75 miles of railroad. I've only got four in maybe 15-20 miles of line. His trains are shorter because his stations and sidings had to be more compact. His freights do more diverse work because a larger fraction of his freight moves from one modeled destination to another (rural setting and more stations both make this easier). My passenger equipment wanted broader curves, and my sloping attic roof meant I wouldn't get much benefit from a multi-lap main line. Dave's winding plan squeezes a lot of scenic & operational good out of his space.

We're both aiming for recognizable prototype locations tied to a specific era. He's compressed his towns more, but he's done an excellent job of choosing and building his 'signature' structures. And his layout is a lot more complete than mine.



Concord NH is his largest and busiest terminal. It usually has two operators; the one in the hole doubles as brakeman for freights with work in Meredith, NH.



My first assignment was the 'Paper Train'. It's just ended its run at Woodsville, NH and the yardmaster is preparing to break it up.



Several different freights switch Ashland, NH in the course of a 'day'.



Woodsville was less congested in the 'afternoon'.



Extra 1501 North (the 'Pompey' job) spent a while in Ashland, on both the outbound and inbound legs of its turn. Here I've cleared the main for a passenger train. If I'd had one more car I'd have had to block the crossing.

A one-time B&M employee told me they'd painted insulated rail joints yellow as necessary to make them more visible to crews. I have CV switch detailing sets, but most of the bag's contents are other items. Proto 87 sells metal etched parts, but I need these for gaps. I settled on laser-engraved ?resin-board? parts from Precision Design (www.pdc.ca). They offer several sizes, I ordered the Code 70 and Code 83/100 six-bolt:



Here, a full 83/100 part is on the outside of the near Code 83 rail, and 1/2 of a code 70 part is between the spike heads on the inside of the far rail. If I hadn't spiked right next to the gaps, I might have been able to get flange clearance from the larger bars. The shape and bolt detail look pretty good, but I haven't zoomed in to the limit. I brush-painted these with yellow artist's acrylic.



They're not really 'in your face' either from track level or eye level, but they do make the gaps more conspicuous to me. I won't know how they are for operators using corrective lenses until I have another session. If they work, I'll need more, but I'll order full frets instead of the 'Easy Paint' I got this time.

James,

All in all, I think you should chalk this one up in the Success column. It sounds like folks had fun, like the glitches are relatively minor (although electronic crashes around here are anything but "minor), and like you have a good handle on What's Next.

I don't have good answers for any of it, so I'm not going to try, but I am following your "Mark the Fouling Point" discussion here and elsewhere. Good questions, and ones I'll have to address soon.

Thanks for the update!

Pete

in Michigan

This is mostly journaling as I digest my dinner and otherwise wind down from op session #5. No pictures because I was as busy as a one-armed paperhanger in fly time.

I had four guests, two who'd never run the Eastern Route before. I decided to use my Saturday timetable for the first time, starting at midnight. It worked and we ran all the passenger trains. But with the clock at 4:1 two of the operators ran out of time before 'noon'.

I cleaned the track enough: Once over all track with my cleaning stick (lattice stock with scrap denim stapled around the end, soaked in 91% isopropanol), followed by a trip over main tracks & leads with my isopropanol/pad cleaning car.

I tried writing out detailed instructions for the Bexley and Lynn Goats (like the 'Train Card' MarkF posted earlier, but not as evolved). The operators didn't refer to them as much as I'd hoped, but they did help clarify a couple of bottlenecks in the freight operating plan.

I tried to avoid all the PSX-1 breakers making the same 'fweep' when tripped, but DigiKey doesn't have compatible parts with different tones. Annoying as it is, I'm not contracting for a container-full from China...

To Do:

1. Get organized about gluing insulation (card, styrene, maybe even wood) into rail gaps. Rail creeps, particularly as seasons change and as you use the RR. I fixed 4 or 5 closed gaps today, at least two which had given trouble before.

2. Either give up on the 3A fuse on the MRC control unit's output, or put a light in parallel with it so it will be unambiguous when it's blown (3 blown in 5 sessions).

3. Finish the in-progress Gorin Machine building and move the MRC wireless dongle up into it, above the benchwork. Moving the parts cabinet helped, but Newburyport needs either better signal or an extension of the plug-in buss.

4. Given current world-wide quality standards for embedded code, I can't avoid DCC device crashes. Today a couple of decoders and one DCC circuit breaker had to be power-cycled. I'm not going to knock products at this stage, but I am logging privately and if I decide to junk something for reliability, I will say what and why.

4. Shift Saturday freight times to reduce the two early-session bottlenecks (getting Portland cars into the EB Casco AM, getting the WB Portsmouth Local's Boston cars into the Oil Job PM). It's music to watch two sophisticated yard operators do that at 6:1, but I need a fallback for when I don't have two - 4:1 isn't enough.

5. Signals to indicate positions of critical turnouts. Parts on hand, and it will be cooler under the layout come July. Scenery until then, I guess.

6. Searching for prototypical but conspicuous markings for rail gaps. I know Conrail painted ties yellow at fouling points, but how was it handled 20 years earlier? 'They Just Knew' doesn't work for visitors.

7. [edit] I hadn't soldered some flextrack joints in Bexley yard when I built it 10 or 12 years ago. Today I paid. Tomorrow I solder. And I check the rest as I insulate rail gaps.

James and Mike,

Many thanks for the tips.

Pete

in Michigan

James, I found that removing a handful of cars from my layout and lessening the number of switching moves made the world of difference in my operations. The operators still got to switch out industries and were still satisfied. This helped relieve congestion.

In model railroad operations, we know that switching out industries and blocking traffic more closely emulates "real" time than running a mainline train does. You can run a model train from one urban area on a layout to another one in a matter of minutes whereas in real time it may take an hour or two or more.

Looks like the lads are enjoying themselves!

I'm not sure if it is really 'teething' - A Seacoast Div. member I know has been operating for 10+ years and his regular crew takes the view 'if it's not one thing, it's another'. I was MoW chair for TMRC, and no matter how well things are engineered & built, entropy sneaks in sooner or later. But it does have me thinking about borrowing a topside creeper and hand-laying replacements for a couple of my most annoying commercial turnouts; heel-thrown points were developed by TMRC to reduce maintenance and they do.

4:1 is as slow as my GML clock goes. Building crew experience is the solution I like best. But if/when I need to make things easier, I can either reduce the freight car count from its present 80, or run my Saturday passenger schedule. In that era, enough jobs were 6 days/week that Saturdays had maybe 3/4 of the normal weekday passenger service. Making the decision before starting the clock will be easier once more of the local operating boomers have been here once already.

James,

Over all, this sounds like a Success. If everyone had fun, then you win. The "teething" issues apparently happen everywhere-- we ran into a lot of that last week out here on a "new" (think "unfamiliar to a lot of the crew") layout, and need to work out a fix.

I think the host had too many trains on the sheet, so he's planning to try two-man crews and about half the trains he had set up. If it works well, then we can add extras. And yes, he has a whole punch list of stuff to fix, some of which we addressed today.

Are you happy with the 4:1 clock ratio, and if not, where are you headed next?

Pete

in Michigan

My 4th op session turned out pretty well: The last freights were about an hour late at their terminals, but the seven of us also ran most of the passenger trains. Despite my replacing weighbills that had confused operators last time, and highlighting routing info on everything that doesn't go via Boston, there were at least 6 freight mis-routes.

This crew was a different mix than last time: The layout was new to 4 of the 6 visitors. One of the most experienced operators had run here before, the other hadn't. We started with 2-man crews. They shifted around at rush hour but Bexley yard had gotten congested so I annulled a few passenger trains rather than break up the remaining 2-man crews. I ran a couple of passenger trains and one freight myself.

My operating scheme entertained everyone, but even with the clock at 4:1, I noticed that I'm assuming the freight crews won't waste many moves - where a run-around or something else that ties up a main track is needed, if you don't do both pickups & deliveries with a single move, you get behind.

I found a mechanical problem in a turnout in Bexley yard's east throat too late to fix before visitors arrived, but I just tagged it; that end is lightly used and it wasn't really missed. Several passenger cars that I've been using for years here and at modular setups acted up repeatedly at several locations, but that ought to make them easy to diagnose.

Electrically, I had burned up a PSX-1 breaker earlier in the week adding sound short-circuit alerters, so mistakes in West Lynn affected 2/3 of the railroad. Alas, I couldn't buy the beepers with different tones, so everybody's directional hearing was tested. They did show me a few intermittent shorts that don't actually stop trains, which are on the punch list.

The MRC wireless worked for the whole three hours, though it was slow to respond to operators in the north end of the attic. I might be able to position the wireless dongle better, but there's no way to avoid a 'radio shadow' from the chimney with only one 'base station'. If I can install more RJ-45 sockets in that end without messing up the bus characteristics, I should, but I won't be sure it works till I use it in an op session.

I was pretty busy piloting & looking at the derailments early on, so I only got a few photos. Alas, bright sun in the windows confused my pocket camera's meter:



Larry, Bengt & Ken collaborate on adding cars to the westbound Oil Job.



Erich's gotten the Oil Job and the 2nd Lynn Goat out of the yard and is looking over the Bexley Goat's industrial work.

For next time: Do more of the prep in advance (two personal crises this week ate time I had set aside). Up to 10 guests if their experience suggests many will prefer 2-man crews. And watch the two switch jobs more closely, so I can intervene before a mess grows too big.

The Eastern Route's first operating session of 2015 will be early on April 4. To help explain activities to those unfamiliar with B&M freight movements, I had drawn a paper schematic. Today I figured out LibreOffice Draw and made a digital version:



This should cover most questions about what's modeled and how it relates to the unmodeled major interchanges.

Nice images, James! Looks like Fun to me!

Pete

in Michigan

I believe all the 'visible' track is handlaid; commercial turnouts and flextrack are used in hidden areas. Jon's basement has an irregular shape, so I can't give exact dimensions, and with all the trackage going here and there I didn't try pacing dimensions. But I think it's at least 40 feet the long way, and between 20 and 30 feet wide. It was an enjoyable afternoon.

That appears to be one huge layout James, and from the looks of that last picture, it's all handlaid track? How big is it? Looks like a fun layout to operate.

My attic layout has been too cold this winter to safely invite a crew for an Eastern Route op session. But I've been doing some running elsewhere, so I thought I'd liven up this rather quiet forum:

Friday I was called off the spare board to run at Bruce R's 'New England freelance' layout.



His crew is experienced and the operating pattern is pretty stable, though Friday was a test of the 'self healing' capabilities of his card-order system, because a lot of equipment remained out of place after a 'guest' operating scheme was tried out. I had a fairly relaxed evening running both freight & passenger.



The layout's been pretty much finished for several years now, though Bruce continues to make improvements and has recently set his sights on the AP Scenery certificate.

This afternoon was different: Jon D. is deeply into the ATSF circa 1950, and his much larger layout goes all-out to represent LAUPT to Barstow and San Diego. Operations are still evolving, but they'd gotten far enough for a first try running freight alongside the passenger service that's Jon's primary focus.



Here a crew of North of Boston Boomers collects to hear the operating plan.



This duck-under is the main entrance. The 1st and 2nd districts bracket the Mission Tower wye, with the descent from Summit toward Victorville at the top.



John L. getting some exercise following his train. It is very much a multi-level layout throughout.



I was stationmaster at LAUPT; here it is with most of the day's arrivals wyed or switched out. Another visitor was Mission towerman. It felt like a visit to the big leagues, as Jon and his helpers have probably 60-70% of the prototype's tracks and switches running quite well.