After OS Omaha

With OS Omaha behind me I can now have some time to breathe.  As I look back on that weekend, I found one thing with my Ops that needs some attention.  While things ran pretty smooth, both mechanically and electrically, even the Ops worked pretty well, with one exception.  I need to work on the scheduling.

My idea that I've ran with over the past several years, I've always run the SB local first over the entire line.  Once it reached the south end of the line, the power was swapped and the crews ran back north to Little Rock.  This takes time, which meant some of the guys were sitting around waiting for something to do.  Not that's out of line for railroading, but when you travel a long distance to play on a layout, you don't want to spend your play time sitting in the crew lounge or walking around watching others play trains.

I had two proposals from some of the visiting crews, one was to include more yard ops and two was to run both locals at the same time. While there just isn't much for yard ops, after that weekend, I did try doing some flat switching of the cars for both locals, breaking them down and blocking before they ran, but again that takes time.

I have not gotten a chance to round up 5 or 6 guys to give running both locals at the same time yet, due to everyone seems to be taking a breather from OS and it's getting close to the holidays.

I've jotted some notes and will try to get a full crew together maybe sometime in December.  If not I'll shoot for sometime after the holiday rush is over.

The last thing I managed to get done to the layout was getting the trees planted around the Ouachita river.