Operations Session 20 May 26

 The month of May is slipping by and activities on the GSD have been at full pace. Earlier in the month we had a visit from the Wednesday morning train group who enjoyed a couple of hours of running trains on a sequence schedule whilst yesterday, the 20th the northern ops group came and ran the Friday PM timetabled session. We were missing our Blue Lake Hostler, Geoff Matthias, but we managed to get through the session, with usual amount of  technical challenges appearing, not the least of which was trying to run 809 with address of 509…. Doh!

Crew was Geoff Tynan Dispatcher; Steve Weedon Blue Lake Yardmaster (pining for his old job as Tantanoola Porter); Operators Ron Solly; Ray Brownbill; and David Orr.Yours truly as Staging Yardmaster. 

Operationally things ran pretty smoothly although the Blue Lake Yardmaster thought I was a bit rough expecting him to remove a wagon from an arriving train and placing it on a departing train in a 20 minute time frame. The 20 minutes being 20 fast minutes, so 5 minutes in real time. There was also a problem in Snuggery when 281 and 574 were trying to shunt the yard at the same time. 

The usual problems with coupler heights gave us some grief at times and some points played up. I will remove the MP4 switches from the mainline points and replace them with Tortoise machines. the DIgikeijs DR4018 Switch Decider will be replaced with DCC Specialties Wabbits, which won’t throw the MP4 or Cobalt switches, only Tortoise machines.

I am very unhappy with my wiring, I think it’s very unreliable so I plan over the next month to clean it up and make it a little more robust.

The Gallery from yesterday. 

Ray edges 251 into Murray Bridge for shunting duties

Ron checks his manifest on VR16 before heading to HEYWOOD

The Yardmaster Steve, works the yard at Blue Lake

Dave runs 932 around his train the pick up a car to place in the Caltex Siding in Murray Bridge

547 hurtles through Bridgewater on it way to Millicent

The Blue Lake Yard has plenty of spare room

After dropping cars at Blue Lake, 830 hauling Train 547 passes Snuggery on its final leg to Millicent

Afternoon tea was served with Helen’s rhubarb cake and cream. The real reason they come and visit.