Looking into the future

Our 51^st session was a cold one – it has had near-zero (Celsius) temperatures and fog here in Vienna for the past few weeks and it gets cold in the cellar. (The minimum is 10 degrees, which is not that cold. But after a while the coldness penetrates your clothing. Tea does only help for a short time.)

On the bright side is the fact that it is only one more month until spring is here, but that is not the point of today’s post.

There were a few things to note: We had a new dispatcher during second shift who did particularly well as I expected. We were too few operators to test him really but he had also no help because of that. And we had a new yardmaster, for whom I hope that the experience was not too bad. It will take some time to clean up Avery yard but that gives me the opportunity to play between sessions.

I note some downward development with our operating sessions and I have yet to find out what the reason is. Or is there more than one reason? The layout is operated in earnest since 2003 and it is more complete than ever and 2011 will see the completion of the lights, the buildings and industries and the CTC panel, after which only a few hundred trees will be missing.

To my surprise the signals usually work as intended, only the shorts are still annoying – most of them would not be occurring if the operators would really watch out for red signals and turnouts thrown against them. Unfortunately, we do have too many derailments which has many reasons: the FoxValley metal wheels are one of them, or to be precise: they have such small wheel threads that they do not work well with Peco turnouts as they all fall into the huge gap at the frog.

But that is still not the point.

The point is that we have in 2011 too few operators to make a really good operating session. And we have far too few helpers during work sessions to make good progress with landscaping.

Speaking of work sessions - Granted, there is a core of about 5 to 6 people who try to attend work sessions regularly, but the work sessions themselves are far and few between. We have not found a system that is flexible enough to guarantee progress. How can we achieve that? If I appoint a date for a work session, far too few people show up – not even those who had encouraged me to find a date. A viable alternative would be to decentralize the organizing, i.e. define projects (e.g. planting trees or re-working bad landscape) and hand over the keys to those people pursuing the goals of the project. On the other hand, I even tried to do that about 2 years ago without success. There was mild interest, but nothing came out of it.

I’m certainly open to any suggestions here. And I do know that not everyone was made to work on models.

The other point is the attendance to operating sessions. We have lost 2 members in 2011 – one through death, the other through not showing up for more than a year. We will lose another one soon, another 3 show up once in a while, often not for more than a year and they usually do not answer on my invitations. (Which is impolite in my opinion.) Than there are the ones that say they would be coming but do not show up without any explanation. That’s rude.

Now, let me get this straight: I have built the layout mostly on my own for my own enjoyment and those of my children and I really don’t care if I’m operating alone or with 1, 2 or many operators. I do it for enjoyment and I could very well play a session as a single operator. But I wanted to open it up for interested fellow modellers and give them the opportunity to enjoy too, expecting nothing more than a bit help now and then.

But when there are more people around, expecting to have fun too, travelling far to attend the session and too few others show up it’s not fair to them, not me.

So re-shaping is in order. There are many possibilities: Change back the date to Saturday evening, enforcing no-show policies (e.g. if one has not shown up for a year or not responded to invitations three times, prune them from the list), make a new round of advertising to find more modellers, change the date to something other, e.g. Sunday evening, operate only every second month instead of monthly, or increase the interval between sessions to 6 weeks,…

I’m open to suggestions up to a certain point, so let’s face the future!