Having just left “A Yard”, an LAJ switcher shoves its cut across District Blvd. and down The Horn Lead to begin work. The cars have already been blocked in car spot order. Even so, it took me about thirty minutes to run through everything.
Today I tested the LAJ layout in its new 1960’s operational format. What I wanted to determine was how long a session would run. Last weekend I was talking to my buddy Kelly Regan about car blocking on a local. We were discussing whether we should block the cars in the train in car spot order when staging the session. Doing so would make the job out in the field easier for the crew. In the past we’ve both had concerns about having guests over and fearing the session would be over too quickly or be too boring. To compensate we’d set the train up so the cars were out of order and would need to be organized out on the road prior to spotting. Our goal being to make things “interesting” both for our guests and ourselves when running solo.
I’m beginning to change my mind on that. While having cars totally out of order does occasionally happen on the prototype, I don’t think it’s the norm. (Any professional rails reading this feel free to weigh in). While I never felt that way in the past, I’m now getting to the point of feeling that intentionally having the train being a blocking nightmare seems a little too contrived for me. Moving forward I’m going to do that less.
On the session I just ran, I assumed the cars were blocked in the correct order in A Yard ahead of time which made things easier and, frankly, less frustrating. Even so, the session ran a full thirty minutes at the end of which I’d “had enough”.
Another ops question presented itself regarding grade crossing protection. I’ve noticed that most of the crossings in the LAJ industrial parks are just protected by crossbucks. There are no flashers. How do they go about their work without impaling passing motorists? I was watching one of Matthew V’s recent videos of the exact area and it seemed to provide the answer. They just run super slowly when working around streets. (Again, I’d love to hear what the pros say about this).