Op session # 5 was held Saturday evening 3/21/15. We had 4 crew members attend, which was enough to give everyone a throttle, with your truly as informal dispatcher. (And question answerer / trouble-shooter)

The railroad ran better than I had hoped given that the last session was last November. The extremely cold winter and corresponding dry conditions caused the track to buckle in several spots that had never been an issue before, but I was able to cut new gaps and drop new feeders in the week prior to the session. The only major problems were a switch where I had completely forgotten to attach the feeders from the points to the main track bus, and a Tortoise with a suspected internal malfunction that caused a non-repairable short circuit at an important crossover in Newberry yard. Luckily, this problem occurred very late in the session and did not have a major impact aside from a 10-15 minute halt to operations while we tried to fix it.

While I did have paperwork ready to support formal TT&TO ops, the small number of operators resulted in a fairly relaxed session, so we ran under “verbal train orders” for lack of a better term.

Another small issue was that there were only 4 locomotives available as “home road” power. One engine, a re-motored PFM Ma&Pa 2-8-0 with a WOW steam decoder, developed a bind that I could not solve prior to the session. Don M. was able to bring several smaller steam engines to serve as temporary “leased power”, so all was well. It was neat to see a little 4-4-0 with a 2-6-0 pusher (both sound-equipped) working hard to get a 12 car train of loaded coal hoppers over the mountain.

Don M. works Newberry yard

No. 4 and No. 21 meet at Wheelerville.

No. 4 at Wheelerville

Leased Bessemer 4-4-0 leads westbound empties at Wheelerville.

All-in-all, a very satisfying evening, hopefully to be repeated in the near future.