Mike Oates came over today and we ran a couple of trains. Mike was the engineer, and also the conductor. In other words, I let him drive the train, as well as come up with the moves. I acted as a switchman - uncoupling cars, coupling cars (and airbrakes!), and throwing the switches. First, train #2 out of Green Springs.
The train is built in the yard and moves out to Occoquan, where’s there a couple of trailing point switches to get off to an easy start. It moves on to Jackson; it has a facing point and a couple of trailing points. It makes for some interesting and challenging moves. Here Mike moves the gondola that we brought from Green Springs into the facing point siding of the Miracle Chair Company.
The train leaves Jackson and heads off to the rest of the un-modeled J&B.
What really happens, is that it pulls into a passing siding on the return loop and is done for the day. Earlier, I had staged Train #1 on the same loop. We had enough time, so we decided to run it. It runs the same path as Train #2, (there’s not a lot of choice on my layout), but it runs in the opposite direction. Jackson was our first stop and wasn’t as hard to switch with our current orders. When we got around to Occoquan, we had 3 facing switches to deal with, so it was quite a different challenge. When we pulled into Green Springs, I found out I just didn’t have the room that I thought I did. We had to break the train and only bring in a piece at a time to handle the limited room.
I had been working on trackwork improvements and it showed, at least to me. 
Unfortunately, I still had a few derailments. They’ll be taken care of in a future work session. Mike and I discussed the possibility of extending my yard by about only six inches or so. Right now, the sidings are just too short. Capacity of 2 7/8 cars could go to an easy 3 cars with just a short extension. It would also allow me to have the arrival/departure track hold five cars plus a caboose, instead of four. It looks like something I can easily do, so it will be the next improvement. The key point is that we had a great time on a fairly small layout. I was quite pleased.
