Dave Park's Cumberland West - Williams Street Yard

For tonight's B&O ops session, I opted for Williams Street Yard, which can get very busy and if the yard master is not careful he can completely gum up the railroad.  Williams Street "Yard" is basically a siding, a stub end track, and the River Interchange to the Western Maryland's Ridgley Yard in the foreground in the photo above.

Since this was the first time I ran Williams Street, I did manage to completely gum up the railroad and made several trains wait for 30+ minutes at the towers around Cumberland station while trying to service train BO11. It didn't help that a local was in town, and one of the towers had trouble with their JMRI CTC machine and couldn't throw turnouts for a while.

At Williams Street, the yard master needs to think ahead and position cars and switcher engines for the servicing tasks at hand before the respective train arrives in the station. This is very similar to how I envision operations at Backnang station on the future Murrbahn layout, so this was a very interesting exercise to try and see what such job would look like. I pretty much failed tonight, so I'm going to try this job again the next time it is available, and see if I can to it better.