A guest at an Ops Session

About a month ago I was invited to join an operating session at a home in my new hometown.  I was excited to have an opportunity to operate on another Modeler's layout as most of my experience seeing other Modelers works in-person has been through small, modular displays at various train shows.

The layout was a fantastic point-to-point style double-deck layout that focused on mainline running and featured a large steel mill.  This steel mill would be my station for the evening.

The job itself was described to me as "easy" and indeed, it was very straight forward. Using my choice of two small switchers, I pulled ignot cars, slag cars, coil and coal cars from spots and placed them at their required locations.  I set out cars for pickup and replaced them with fresh cars from staging.  Over the course of a few hours I actually got to try my hand at a wide variety of operational techniques that were new to me and I only screwed up a few times! (despite having to navigate no less than TWO double-slip switches.)

By the end of the evening I had learned a lot.  I'm very thankful for the opportunity to run on someone else's railroad and it has given me a lot to consider as my designs for the MFR 2.0 continue to evolve.