operating session #22

The Burrlington Northern held op session #22 on Friday, Dec 6 from 10am to 4pm. Dave Enger dispatched, with Dave Cook and Ray Wheeler on Interbay, Terry Dillon and Eric Dahlgren on Stacy, Kirk Reddie and Tim Taylor on Everett, Joe Green on MILW, and Don Trettel on Burlington. Lisa Murray, Al Lowe and Steve Haas worked the locals and pool trains. Here are some photo highlights:

Al did a nice job with the Sky Local, which is seen here rounding the bend on its way into the Skykomish yard. Not a long train, but very photogenic:

Here he's picking up the loaded gravel from the Grotto pit before spotting his empties there:

Somehow Al and Lisa managed to have a cornfield meet in Mukilteo. Lisa was kind enough to pose for the photo, but Al was too eager to resolve the situation:

Meanwhile, Kirk was getting his head wrapped around the Everett Bayside yard. It was going fine when Steve brought in a train:

 And then Don:

But by the time Lisa arrived on the scene things were pretty plugged up! She seems to be enjoying it, but I don't know about Kirk. You can see that he used at least one of the styrene I-beam "car tabs" I had made the previous day (in the orange gondola), but I didn't see any of the other yardmasters use them, and Kirk's comment was that they were useful for the first hour or two, but once you had the waybill scheme figured out it wasn't worth the extra time to use them:

We enjoyed a relaxing quick lunch at the nearby QFC/Starbucks:

And then got back to work. Here is the MILW coast train under Joe's control, passing through Interbay, and here is a link to the video of same:

And here's Terry working away on the Stacy St. yard complex:

We also ran the two passenger trains (Empire Builder and International), but I didn't get any photos of them. All in all a great day!