Yesterday my sister-in-law and her daughter, my 11 going on 12yo niece stopped by. I had just finished repairing some rocks in Deep Cut that had pushed into the clearance over the winter. Niece said she wanted to come over some day when I was running trains. I replied that I had a train ready to go and needed to test to be sure the repairs were good.
She has used my 2-stick controller before and just needed a 30 second refresher. We left the Indoor division with 2 45-Ton diesels pulling a short train of two box cars and a caboose. She handled the train like the experienced engineer that she is. Most of her experience is on Bob’s layout on free-run days before TrainOps. We made three trips around the Wye before returning to the indoor division. The run was not without incident, but all were fault of track needing spring maintenance.
When we got back inside I had her switch out a few cars to put them back where they belonged. When we were done she mentioned that the switching was the most fun. I asked if she would like to come by when I run an operating session and got a resounding SURE!!!
This could be a fun summer