Attendees: Bill Mosteller (whym), Glenn Downing (whaym), Mike Kipps, Steve Robbins (o), Jerry Ritter (d), Bruce Kaufman, Dick Munnikhuysen (tpym) and Rick Lull.

A tightening of the rules, a failure of the Form 19 system, the breakdown of engine 44 and a White Hall yard crew that kept dispatching their engines. That was the flavor of the 116th session. But at least no one put the White Hall observation car in the turntable pit! I took the opportunity at this session to try and tighten up the way we run. Up to this point we really had been running a "mother may I" type of operation where the operator would contact the dispatcher before the departure of any train and get the dispatcher's approval. With this session unless the dispatcher intervened we would let the TT/TO system prevail. And while there were growing pains, and will continue to be growing pains, I felt it went well and we rant more closely to a true TT/TO environment. A result of this new environment was the dispatcher would have to write orders if he wanted to override the timetable. And several times we tried to do just that. But each time the late train showed up before we could get the superseding orders written and once when we needed to have orders go to multiple crews the computer system supporting the train orders crashed. I guess this was our first time down this road. To add to the fun engine 44 decided to throw its eccentric and had to stop in Hood where it would turn over its consist to another engine. And the White Hall yard crew, in between keeping White Hall moving, dispatched their yard engines several times by hitting the "Disp" button on the throttles by mistake. But all of this was minor and the session went well. Good work 116th crew!