FRONT RANGE RAIL 2023, David Stewart's Appalachian & Ohio, O scale

The second day of Front Range Rail I operated on the David Stewart's O scale Appalachian and Ohio layout. The session was divided into two sections, in the first half I operated a coal shifter called the Scarlet Shifter. This job started as an empty that had to thread the mainline to a yard where it took a branch line to work a bunch of coal tipples, setting out the empty hoppers and picking up loads. normally I would have been able to work out and back but the train took too long to get over the main line and I ended up dying on the branch.

My second job was to be the dispatcher. I have dispatched before and I was looking forward to trying it on a real CTC machine, however to get traffic moving fast and "untie" a knot I had Bob Sobol get the ball rolling and teach me as he did the job. Once I understood how it all worked and trains were flowing I took over.