Wow. It’s been a LONG time since I hosted any sort of operations session. Ken came down today, but I do believe that it will be harder to get him back. He ran into our usual “traffic” in the area - an accident on the beltway prevented him from getting to my house at a reasonable hour.
Of course, it DID give me time to set everything out…
Early Wednesday morning and it’s already HOT and HUMID, but the cars are set out, ready to depart from Green Springs Yard.
I only plan to run one train today, but there IS a second ready to go on the staging track…
To be honest, it’s not really my “typical” ops session. It’s been a long time, so I told Ken that maybe it would be a fix and run type of session…Run a train for a bit, but fix problems as we discover them…
Well, it didn’t take long for a problem to appear! The train was derailing in the yard…and we eventually discovered that a joiner was broken…except on closer examination, the RAIL had also broken. So, time to replace the track! Well, one thing led to another - it had broken on a curve…we COULD have replaced a section of track and had multiple sections in that spot, but I remembered I had a 6 foot section of rail in the garage…except it was from Bob’s old layout and he had replaced it because the ties had NOT held up to the UV and were all faded and brittle. BUT, I had purchased a BOX of new tie sections… Yeah, so we replaced the ties and eventually got a much larger section replaced…but the ops sort of went downhill from there… 
Couplers were BAD, track was bad…
But we kept going!
And we discovered that squirrels LOVE to EAT the TenMille ground throws…making them rather ineffective for changing the train direction 
AND the heat and humidity just didn’t encourage working outside today.
But, I think a LOT was done, but only in the sense that there’s a LOT more to do!
But, it was great seeing Ken again so all is good! I just hope he can come down again - but maybe in the fall when it’s a LOT cooler and I have done a LOT more work.
