Last night, my friend Eric Dilger came over to run trains for the first time. We are both in Scouting with Jack who had told Eric all about running the trains. It was the first time with the new lighting which was great - there were no shadows on the layout. Eric jumped right in and quickly got the knack of the Digitrax throttles. I had all the cars positioned for the session and had even made up a train sequence ... which I promptly forgot to follow.
The session really did run surprisingly smooth for Eric's first time. As we went along, I was making mental notes of some adjustments I need to make, like mounting a map since I live in Dayton where most folks don't know the specific geography of the modeled Pittsburgh area. Also, it would be good to pair a new person up with an experienced brakeman to help walk them through the paces. I was doing this in between jobs as yardmaster in Irwin. Of course, I need more throttles and a couple more locomotives would be nice too!
In the end, we managed to run all the scheduled trains (albeit out of sequence) and service all the sidings. A heck of an accomplishment since I had not run any trains for a couple of months. I still need to work on the car card system. We followed the waybills but in the end, the west staging was full, there were only 2 cars in the Irwin yard and 2 tracks in the east staging. I want it to be a bit more balanced so I can flip the waybills, turn the engines and run the next session.
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