Attendees: Howard Heltman (whym), Wayland Moore (tppmym), Mike Kipps, Philip Taylor (whaym), Jerry Ritter (tpamym), Charles Curley (o), Bruce Kaufman (d) and Dick Munnikhuysen.
November 19, 2011 - the 85th OPS session was billed to be an easy uneventful session. Wrong! It started out with #121 leaving Broadway before its scheduled departure time. (The fact that the train crew didn't have a timetable with them might have contributed to this error.) The yard crew started their day turning the CEO's car which was not scheduled to move. Then #121 ran the helix interlock at Swift Run. In fact the engineer of #121 would continue to ignore red signals most of the day. #33 did double with the motive power for #110 to Thorny Point to assume its switching duties which it seemed to perform acceptably. Then the engineer of #31 decided he had waited enough for clearance to enter White Hall and ran the red entrance semaphore. This caused stress in the White Hall assistant YM which resulted in the White Hall switcher coming to rest in the turntable pit. Add in the usual electrical problems with a few switches (there are always some and they are never the ones I fixed from the previous session so I guess that is good) and things were not going as advertised. Traffic was high and we had to run a second Hood Turn both of which Mike got. During his second visit to Hood Brothers Packing they were unloading cars about as fast as he could spot them. In fact he thought one time he would never get away from Hood. The session ended up with fifteen cars on the C&O interchange (which was correct) and an almost empty White Hall yard (which also seems to be correct). All in all things performed well and I think we kept the operator busy especially in Hood. I hope everyone had an enjoyable time. I guess we will have to wait for the next session to have that first session that ends on schedule. Did I mention that this was an all FQO session? That explains it!
