Murphy's Law states that "Anything that can go wrong will go wrong." On a model railroad, this is never truer than when you try to show your layout off to others. And that's exactly what happened tonight. I had a few guys over to run trains. I wouldn't call it a full-fledged operating session but I had told them to "Bring something to run." My friends happily obliged supplying some really cool stuff. Unfortunately though the layout didn't exactly perform well.
The first problem was yours truly completely forgot to line some of the yard turnouts back to the main line and a couple of trains ended up where they shouldn't have. I've got nobody to blame but myself for that one. But being me, I manged to make the mistake, realize it and yet make it again!
The next issue the cropped up was us overloading my MRC throttle pack. We were running several long trains with multiple-unit consists. I think that was just too much as we kept tripping the breaker. So I had to send one train into the yard.
Now, one of my friends brought over an Athearn Challenger lettered for the Clinchfield. I was excited to see it run. Now my friend is a DCC guy but my layout is stuck in the stone age with DC cab control. Well, said challenger has a dual mode decoder which, in theory should have run just fine on my layout. But with the sound, it wouldn't budge unless it was given full throttle. Not only that, but it consistently hopped the rails when traversing the Peco crossovers at Johnstown. Oh well, it still holds the distinction of being the largest locomotive to ever run on the Pittsburgh Division. Other than that, there was a whole lot of stalling, breakaways and derailments.
Anyway, issues aside, a good time was still had by all.
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| Atlantic Coast Line FTs stetching their legs. This is their first run on this layout. |
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| N&W 611 & LIRR C420 |
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| Vising GP18 meets a PRR GP7 and GP9 |
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| Visiting C40-8 |
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Visiting Southern GP18
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