Sunday morning ... time for more driving.
This photo is on Lone Star Rd between Arbuckle and Colusa about halfway between Sacramento and Redding. In other words: In the middle of the Central Valley. Google Maps suggested this route instead of taking I-5 to Williams and then cutting over to Colusa. Maybe a little bit faster than taking the freeway, and definitely a lot more fun.
I arrived early in Colusa, so I drove a bit through downtown to see if I could maybe find an open local cafe to get some more coffee. No such luck, but I got to see what all that rain from the last few weeks has done to the Sacramento River.
Arriving at Walt Schedlers Southern Pacific layout, I took a look around the room before the ops session started. This is an impressive layout. 4 levels around the walls, plus a multi-level peninsula.
The layout depicts the SP main line along the upper Sacramento River from the Central Valley through Dunsmuir up "the hill" to Mount Shasta station and beyond.
Walt has done a nice job building up scenery, including inventive ideas working around the roof support structure. This beam surely can't be moved for the railroad, so it gets incorporated into the layout!
Along with Gene (deep in thought about the next moves in the photo below), I got the McCloud River Railroad / Mt. Shasta Yardmaster / Operator job. We spent most of the session shuffling cars between the McCloud RR main yard in the foreground, McCloud Lumber, and the yard in Mt. Shasta with the interchange to the SP mainline in the middle of the photo next to Gene.
Walt has an intricate system for the operations paperwork, which includes a sequence schedule and switch lists for the various jobs and assignments on the railroad.
Later in the day, I got to run the "Klamath Falls Merchandise - West" (KFM-W), from Klamath Staging to Dunsmuir South Yard. Here we are south of the Cantara Loop running alongside the upper Sacramento River.
This was a very enjoyable session on a big layout with a great host and everyone had a good time.
No comments:
Post a Comment