Reidsville Scenery

Have done a little work so far this week. This is the view coming up out of Danville staging thru Edna Signal by Reidsville.

The back side of the street will be a city block. The entire level will be fall scenery. It helps to be able to ride around now and see the colors. Harder to imagine fall colors in March.

Looking south from Edna, the woods separating Reidsville from Jamestown. That looks like 20 miles, right?


I've went back and updated the train tags with the new symbols and added EOT tags.

Scenery In the Yards

With all the visitors out of the way, I went back to scenery. I pulled all the trains out of the yards (in part to test a short problem which turned out to be a defective PM42) and ballasted both yards. I also added a few background trees to Charlotte Yard, but couldn't do much as there just wasn't any room.

I was able to do more with Danville Yard and incorporated two pieces I had salvaged from my old layout. They don't fit perfectly into the new scenery, but I wanted a bit of the old with the new.

First Ops Session

17 months and 14 days after I started cutting trees down, I had my first Operating Session. I expected plenty of problems and the first crew was carefully selected having already experienced their baptism of fire. Now that we've proved it can run, I can open up a session to more users.

The first 10 minutes were a disaster. Engines not running, yard throat shorting out, engines mysteriously unconsisted, etc. etc. etc. After a while things settled down. We did experience an unknown Digitrax problem after the first hour that we haven't yet solved. The PM 42 was giving us shorts on the first district, but there were no trains there. Resetting the command station worked for 10 minutes and the short reappeared.

Larry Keller* goes down in history as running the first train on the CCSB 2.0 (The Asterisk is because Gil Brauch picked the first train order, but had problems out of the yard. Larry bypassed him to become the first. I am sure this will be be debated for years to come.)

 Jeff Lindstrom works the WSS/HPT&D.Jeff has learned to never volunteer for anything again.

The first Ops crew: (L to R) Larry "Paint Bank" Keller, Marcus "I Can Dispatch Anything" Neubacher, Robin "Watch This" Eanes, Jeff "Southbound" Lindstrom, Gil "Road Boss" Brauch.