OK, I know you want to know what we’ve been doing here in Minneapolis. You know we’ve been dealing with a flooded campground; we’ve retreated to higher ground where we are now waiting for the waters to recede and the ground to dry so we can move back down into the full-hookups area. I assume you don’t want to see pictures of doctors’ waiting rooms and offices. So, I’ve decided to try to explain one of the things we’ve been doing a little of here: operating friends’ model railroads.
We’ve done this twice since we arrived in the Minneapolis/St Paul area. Once on the Sierra Western and once on the Great Northern Minot Division. Sounds impressive doesn’t it?
The challenge is trying to explain that to people who have no experience in this hobby. Some of us tell people that what we do is design a huge board game, decide which set of rules we will use, then invite our friends over to play. What I’ve often said is that we build miniature railroads then operate them as if they were real railroads. We lay tracks in towns and RR yards, set up paperwork systems, assign crews to various jobs, and try to move goods in a timely manner just as the real railroads do. So here’s some pictures to try to help you visualize all that.
Some of the crew members gathering at the GN Minot Div. I forgot to count how many were there last night but there were 17 at the Sierra Western the night we were there.
As part of the preparation at the GN crew members put on radio headsets that they will use to talk to one another just like full-sized railroads’ crews use radios for communications now. At the SW crews communicate with the dispatcher by telephones representing tower operators who used telephones on the full-sized railroads back in the 1960s, the era of the SW.
Our trains don’t have big engines into which we can climb to run them so we use small handheld throttles to move the trains. Each throttle can run any train on the railroad. We use a computer program to tell each throttle what to run next since one throttle will need to run several different trains during an operating session.
Each railroad has a dispatcher. The one the GN last night was Jerry.
The GN uses verbal track warrants to authorize train movements. The dispatcher keeps track of train locations by moving markers on a schematic of the railroad’s main lines.
The Sierra Western uses time table and train orders to authorize train movements. Here Mark keeps track of those movements on a train sheet.
The SW also has a tower. The tower operator throws the switches that align the turnouts in the yard so each arriving or departing train goes down the correct track. Here’s the display board that shows those tracks. It doesn’t look this blurry in real life but I was in the way so had to snap the picture quickly.
Here’s the freight and passenger yards controlled by the tower. Yes, that’s Dave at the far end working the freight yard–his favorite position on the Sierra Western. Randy is working the passenger yard on the other side of this very long aisle.
On full-sized railroads trains move long distances across the country. Our basements are limited in size so we have staging where trains go to represent far off parts of the country. Here Tom, the owner of the SW, is checking his charts to see what trains belong on what tracks in his triple-decker staging yards. The control panel you see is for the top and bottom layers. The middle layer’s panel is around the other side of the curve.
The crews get lots of paperwork to help them do their jobs but that paperwork is simplified as much as possible to help them do it more quickly than full-size railroads do. This set of boxes hold car cards which tell the crew members which cars are going to which destinations. The schematic on the front of the boxes tell them the relationship between this town and other towns so they can see if a town is further down the line in the direction they are headed or behind them. If a car is headed to a town behind them they leave that car for a different train to pick up. The blue circle S is holding at Stanley so the industry can load/unload it. The orange stripe on the pickup says that car is going to the Crosby Branch. There’s a lot more information available on the cards if the crew has the time and interest to read them but these keys let them do their work quickly if they need to clear up for a hot shot passenger train, like the Empire Builder, heading their way.
If the car is headed for the town they are at now, they need to know where the industry is that gets that car. This schematic is for the town of Stanley on the GN Minot Division.
Some towns are so big they need more than one person to work them. Minot is a big city; it has, from back to front, a yardmaster, a brakeman and an engineer.
Wendover, on the SW, is a much smaller town so John can work it alone.
Russ could work Summit on the SW alone but that day he brought his son Kyle to assist him.
It used to be traditional to put little tiny buildings as close together as you could on a model railroad to make the towns look busy. Once people started truly operating the railroads as a system instead of just running trains around them, it became clear those tiny building couldn’t produce enough goods to justify the train traffic we desired to see on our model railroads. Bigger buildings are a fairly new phenomena on model railroads but John O., the owner of the the GN Minot Division, gets them right.
Doesn’t it look to you like it would take several of those railroad cars to haul the goods produced by these industries? Moving those goods are what model railroad operations are all about. That and playing the game.
TTYL,
Linda
