I ran at the Denver Garden Rwy’s layout at the Colorado RR Museum yesterday. In addition to getting a few minor issues sorted out, a bad gas fill valve in the WD,
and installation of brass wire into the water glasses of each engine, was able to get in several hours of running with my coal train cars with each engine.
Also found the need to replace the constantly feathering safety valve on the WD with a Wee Bee pop. I already have a Wee Bee pop installed on the Plantation,
and it uses 1/2 the water consumption of the WD for the same run time.
The highlight of the day’s running was to double head both engines under steam pulling the train set.
Serviced both engines together, lit them both off at the same time, brought each up to operating pressure and turned down the fire, Plantation came up first
as it’s a 40 psi engine where the WD is a 60 psi engine. When both were ready, opened both throttles and took off.
Each engine has link and pin couplers, so it was easy to see to get the lead engine (Plantation) to pull constantly against the trailing engine’s (WD) road speed,
and not get shoved along by the trailing engine. Made several dozen circuits of the track with no problems, until the WD ran low on water.
So it seems that successful operation of double headed manually run engines by one engineer is do-able on a fairly level raised live steam track.
However, on an undulating ground track I believe that R/C and 2 engineers with close coordination would be needed.
