Saturday, March 3, 2007

March 3rd was the second session of 2007. 15 operators showed up. That plus the Superintendent of Nearly Everything made a crew of 16, three more than the previous record. Perhaps it was the relatively mild weather or the cancellation of the March op session at Joe Fugate's Siskiyou Lines or maybe it was the rumors about the new layout lighting but nearly everyone invited showed up. Doncha hate it when that happens? Not really... For once we didn't need to go scrounging to find crews for all the trains. We ran schedule D (which is identical to schedule C except the passenger local runs East from Salem to Pocatello).

We ran all 13 trains on the line up plus a lite helper move caused by one of the trains turning out to be underpowered for getting up "the hill". Mostly the trains stayed on the tracks. Plus there was a bit of new rudimentary scenery in Oakhill by the wye (Mary Keigh style - lotsa pink!).

Kudos go to the yard crew, Len Bruening (YM) and Jim Barta (switch crew) for handling all the traffic through South Jackson yard without breaking a sweat. Having a crew of two in yard makes a huge difference by letting the YM concentrate on strategic thinking while classification and trimming continue getting interrupted only when blocks need to be swapped with passing trains.

Brandon Thompson took the Redland local switcher assignment with Pete Johnson (a real life hogger) keeping him on his toes.

Joe Brugger gamely took on the 1st trick dispatching detail while the Superintendent of Nearly Everything took the second trick.

Overall things ran pretty smoothly! Much to my relief.

The company photographer seems to have decided to shoot a bunch of home movies for this session. So instead of photos there is a video clip. The clip is about 11 mega-bytes so if you're on a slow dial up connection be warned! At 56kbaud it's likely to take almost an hour to download the clip.

To see the clip click here.

We all seemed to have a good time!