Re: SAMRA Show Retrospective

[Scott A Smiley <sc.smiley@juno.com>]

I agree with Ira's assessment below.  Here are a few more points.  I
think Ira's control panel work marvelously.  Great work.    I saw that
the trains ran over the switches and diamonds much smoother and did not
hear of many accidents that were caused by the track. 

 I heard several comments about putting Plexiglass on the outside  or the
corners for when we have wrecks, the trains do not go to the floor. 
Also, by the diamonds on the inside was recommended.  I think this would
be a good addition and that the molding Ron did as a test would work for
these specific locations well.  We would just drop the glass into the
slot.

My accessories did not work well but I think that is because I never
plugged in the control unit as it says to do, next time.  

Ed's bridge units are great.  Very nice addition to the layout.  Thanks
Ed.

Scott

On Sun, 03 Feb 2002 06:58:46 -0600 "Ira Schneider"
<ira_schneider@Iname.com> writes:
> I think the SAMRA show went very well.  The time we spent last 
> weekend working on modules really
> paid off.  There were no major power drops and our trains ran very 
> smoothly.  Also, track
> alignment was good, thanks in part to Randall and Ryan who leveled 
> the layout after we had set it up.
> 
> My exercise in trying to build a master schedule for the event 
> taught me that we don't need one.
> First of all, it was impossible to build such a schedule.  Secondly, 
> some people didn't show up,
> leaving holes in the schedule, and other people showed up at times 
> other than I had expected them.
> Just using the schedule board to list who is running and who is up 
> next worked just fine.  I was
> actually surprised that many times during the day people (including 
> myself) were begging for
> someone to take over their tracks so they could rest.  I thought we 
> would be more likely to have
> people begging for tracks to run on, but that didn't happen.  I 
> think the "first come, first served"
> scheduling worked well.
> 
> We had a couple of operating accidents, but that always happens.  A 
> couple of times an operator
> was distracted when running two trains on the same track and one 
> train rear-ended the other.  Once
> I was bringing a train onto a siding and dialed the wrong track 
> number on the CAB-1 so the train
> overshot the end of the siding and collided with the train waiting 
> to exit a siding.  Once we somehow
> got two trains switching places to get out of synch so one went into 
> reverse when one went into
> forward, both on the mainline at opposite ends of the siding.  
> Eventually, we got one train on the siding,
> where I was able to control it independently.
> 
> I can only recall one incidence during this run where an operator 
> left his train on a siding for a couple
> of hours when he left the area.
> 
> Overall, there were very few operating problems and I think everyone 
> had fun.  Thanks to all of you.
> I am looking forward to the next club run.
> 
> 
> Ira
> 
> 
> ------
> TTAT members reflector.
> 
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