Matt Sturgell and Kelly Regan guide the local off the CSX main onto The Downtown Spur at the start of the op. session.
It’s been far too long since I’ve had an op. session on The Downtown Spur. It should come as no surprise that getting off one’s fat ass and actually inviting people over has a productive outcome! Kelly Regan and Matt Sturgell came over on Sunday for what I’d consider one of my better sessions.
I’ve been giving a lot of thought over the past few years as to how to make these sessions a better experience for guests, more realistic, and just generally a smoother affair overall. The root of the problem is the hobby operations culture that we, as hosts, follow,….myself included. Hosts don’t want guests to be bored. They want to show off their hard work in all of its glory. In our benignly misguided attempt to do the right thing, our solution is to create a session full of gimmicks, complexity, and puzzles. The hope is that the guests will find this entertaining. News flash, they don’t. Newbies are totally disoriented when they arrive in terms of geography. Essentially, what happens is that we hosts give our guests a throttle and an arcane switch list and say, in effect, “figure this out, it will be soooo much fun!” Throwing somebody in a pit and watching them scratch their head and try to crawl out of such pit isn’t cool. It isn’t realistic either.
Between discussions with Kelly and my own thoughts this is what I’ve done.
-First, the layout owner is the conductor. He has the switch lists. The guests don’t see the paperwork unless they want to (and….big surprise, they really don’t want to see it). The guests handle the throttle, coupling, and turnouts. That, in and of itself, solves a ton of problems.
-Second, limit the session to 90 minutes. That’s quite enough for most people.
-Follow the prototype example and have the train correctly blocked at the start of the session. No sorting and re-ordering of cars mid-session.
-Limit the number of artificially difficult switch moves, such as digging a car out on a spur from behind several others. This does need to be done sometimes, but it’s the exception, not the rule.
-Don’t switch every industry, every session
-Not every industry entails a “loads-for-empties” swap. The larger ones often do, the smaller industries generally do not. I caught myself mid-session with one of these and plucked the offending car off the layout and removed the move from the switchlist. Smaller industries generally entail picking up an empty and nothing more or spotting a load and nothing more.
I’ve experimented with props over the years. My opinion changes back and forth. Right now, I skip most of them. I do still use the operational fusees and gates. I don’t use the locks on the turnout throws (but may in the future). Prototype operations are marked with frequent pauses. I handle this by explaining to the guests at various junctures what would be happening (conductor walking, air tests, etc.), but don’t get too hardcore about it. The one thing I’m a stickler for is keeping the running speeds realistically slow but this generally isn’t a problem with most guests.
Click HERE for a short YouTube clip of the end of the session.