operating session #23

The Burrlington Northern held op session #23 on Saturday, Dec 7 from 10am to 4pm. Dave Enger and I shared the dispatching, with Dave Cook on Interbay, Todd Von Stup and his son Nik on Stacy, Len Thompson and Tim Taylor on Everett, and Mike Chandler on Burlington. Doug Hicks, John Thompson and Joe Green worked the locals and pool trains. Here are some photo and video highlights:

We had three visitors from Vancouver BC, one of whom (Len) was generously willing and able to manage the Everett/Bayside yard. I had fun watching him get his arms around it, and as you can see he came up with some clever solutions to trains threading their way through his territory:

Mike Chandler enjoyed the Concrete Local while handling the extensive switching in the Burlington area:

...sometimes sharing the stairs with Todd and Nik, while they worked the "Chrome Collector" job in downtown Seattle, from Stacy St. yard. It looks like Nik is handling the throttle while Dad tries to figure out which car goes where:

The Chrome Collector was a lot of fun this time, knocking into illegally parked cars, per prototype practice. Click here to see a low quality video of the crashes:

Meanwhile, Dave called for a video crew when he saw that his southbound train #139 was moving across the Snohomish River bridge #10 in parallel to the Sky Local up on the trestle near Skykomish. You can see the resulting video here.

Once he entered Bayside yard in Everett, though, things bogged down:

And it took them quite a while to sort it out!

On the whole a very fun day!