Why I build this stuff….

Some people build their model railroads for the sake of the modeling. Not me. I build this railroad so that it can be operated, and I’m willing to forgo certain things (such as highly detailed scenery) for the sake of getting crews running on the line and moving traffic.

The Twin Cities hosted another invitational operating event (ProRail) just this past weekend, and I ran a couple of sessions for the out-of-town visitors. I also ran three session for locals earlier this month (in 22 days I ran 5 op sessions and an open house for the Twin Cities Division).

The hurdle to getting an op session going right now is managing the paperwork. The eventual goal is to have an agent position that writes up the B-7s for the switch crews, but until then I have to write them up ahead of time. That’s a fair bit of work, and I don’t want to have to do it for each of the session. So I cheat. I recorded the starting position of every car on the railroad, and restaging is really just putting everything back to where it was at the beginning of the session. Every crew gets the same paperwork, in the same order.

No two crews have run things exactly the same way, even with this level playing field of identical starting positions. And that’s perfectly fine — I don’t think there’s a single right way to do things. There are some wrong things to do, but the system is forgiving and will work itself out if the crew does something really unusual.

Since there’s really no “finish line” (unless everyone gets through all of the paperwork I’ve prepared, which has never happened), crews just run until we’re ready to be done. Right now that seems to be around 2 1/2 hours of operating, although several of the ProRail operators said they’d have happily kept going for another couple of hours.

I do need to balance out the traffic better. The Produce Yard crews had less to do than the North District crews, with more “overhead” traffic than take-outs and spot-at’s. I’ve got some ideas for making the “Produce Yard” more specific, so that spotting cars there will be a bit more “sure-spot” like. And the additional industries that will be served by the same crew, south of Market Street, will help even out the work.