D&J RailRoad
Professor of HO
Just relaxing for a few minutes before the operators start arriving for today's op session.
I promoted today's op session as a steam only day. In particular, with smoke and sound. I pulled all the modern freight cars off the layout so mostly early 1950s freight and passenger would be in service. Took quite a few storage tubs to do that.
Got the industries stocked with loads or empties out and the yard set up with trains to deliver and pickup cars along with the Way Bills.
Gotta clean the house too so it doesn't look like a college dorm. Got the snacks and drinks ready to set out a little later in the day. Tracks are cleaned and floors vacuumed. The project desk is cleaned up and unfinished projects stored away in boxes. The command station has been purged of all loco slots and the signal computer is booted up with a refreshed memory.
About half of the trains to run today will be coal service. I have about 250 cars ready for the local runs, all broken down into east bound or west bound. Ten steam locos sitting in the ready tracks and the staging tracks cleared for guest steam locomotives. The JMRI is up and running on the programming computer in case of trouble locos. Not going to do a lot of trouble shooting as that takes my attention away from hosting the op session, but I can do a quick address programming if needed.
I had a friend over this past week to link his ESU system over to see if it would play nice with my Digitrax. After a little trouble shooting, splicing and hammering, it started working. My signal system didn't want to play though. The Railroad Co. software was probably confused as it saw the Digitrax and the ESU waveform and just gave up. All blocks appeared occupied. I think the settings of the Railroad Co. software require you to designate what command station you are using. The advantage of using the ESU would be so that operators can bring their own throttle controller to run trains here, regardless of the make. So Digitrax, NCE, ESU etc. can all be used at the same time. After running that test, I stripped it all back out and returned to the Digitrax system.
OK, so today's ops will run from about noon till 6pm or so. We'll just run trains around the basement till about 1:30 then transition into the ops session with assignments handed out. When the last train is back into the yard we will just go back to running trains.
I promoted today's op session as a steam only day. In particular, with smoke and sound. I pulled all the modern freight cars off the layout so mostly early 1950s freight and passenger would be in service. Took quite a few storage tubs to do that.
Got the industries stocked with loads or empties out and the yard set up with trains to deliver and pickup cars along with the Way Bills.
Gotta clean the house too so it doesn't look like a college dorm. Got the snacks and drinks ready to set out a little later in the day. Tracks are cleaned and floors vacuumed. The project desk is cleaned up and unfinished projects stored away in boxes. The command station has been purged of all loco slots and the signal computer is booted up with a refreshed memory.
About half of the trains to run today will be coal service. I have about 250 cars ready for the local runs, all broken down into east bound or west bound. Ten steam locos sitting in the ready tracks and the staging tracks cleared for guest steam locomotives. The JMRI is up and running on the programming computer in case of trouble locos. Not going to do a lot of trouble shooting as that takes my attention away from hosting the op session, but I can do a quick address programming if needed.
I had a friend over this past week to link his ESU system over to see if it would play nice with my Digitrax. After a little trouble shooting, splicing and hammering, it started working. My signal system didn't want to play though. The Railroad Co. software was probably confused as it saw the Digitrax and the ESU waveform and just gave up. All blocks appeared occupied. I think the settings of the Railroad Co. software require you to designate what command station you are using. The advantage of using the ESU would be so that operators can bring their own throttle controller to run trains here, regardless of the make. So Digitrax, NCE, ESU etc. can all be used at the same time. After running that test, I stripped it all back out and returned to the Digitrax system.
OK, so today's ops will run from about noon till 6pm or so. We'll just run trains around the basement till about 1:30 then transition into the ops session with assignments handed out. When the last train is back into the yard we will just go back to running trains.
