I bet that many know very well who Mr. Murphy is! For the rest it’s the guy who formulated a few laws that apply do everything we do. For example “What could go wrong, will.” “If you drop something it will fall in way as to inflict the most severe damage on the thing it will fall onto and on itself” – you get the idea.
I very well expected to have a lot of operators around for this occasion, but everything went downhill with even the dispatcher calling in sick just hours before session start. And there were a lot of “perhaps”, which is useless for planning – more on that later.
To make bad things worse, our printer quit during printing out the session plan and the switchlist. And by “quit” I mean it as in “spit out the gears, but not the paper”, which it duly did. It was too late for a trip to the local copy shop and since there were just a few operators left we would be doing nicely without the papers by just running a few trains and quit.
When we arrived at the layout’s location we found out that we forgot our camera, so there would be no photos of the session, which I had planned to do.
As always I did not count on the determination of the crew. In the end we managed to run nearly all the trains that were planned and there were no “dispatcher’s woes” as I was able to plan the moves ahead and except for a few glitches all the signals worked, including JMRI itself (which was no surprise as it does that most of the time). So Mr. Murphy left us at the beginning of the session and stayed away.
What had been annoying – as always – were the derailments. Usually the metal wheels from Fox Valley don’t match very well with the Peco turnouts and with small kinks in the trackwork and especially with turnouts at the end of inclines. Not to mention the Shinohara 3-way turnout which was obviously not made to any standards the axles adhere to.
All in all there were surprisingly few defects, no decoder quitting all of a sudden and no mass-loss of kingpins or couplers.
An absolute highlight of the evening was how Robert filled the yardmaster’s job from the top of his head, without any plans in hand. He managed to get everything right which is a clear sign that he should really be considering getting the dispatchers job.
And speaking of highlights – the enhanced fluorescent lighting really enlightened us! The valance, though, will be a summer job.
Florian and Adrian experimented a bit and were able to mount antlers on a few Preiser-deer they had found somewhere and placed the modified animals around the layout.
All in all it was another successful and funny evening. Mission accomplished!
