The good, the bad, and the ugly.Well, it's been a long time, but TBC has finally reopened for operations after nearly 4 years or operational inactivity. We have an annual modellers meet every year in BC (except during COVID) and as part of it, we have nearly 10 Vancouver-area layouts open for operating sessions. I hosted two this past weekend with 4 guest crew members each day and it was great to see things come back to life. Here are a few takeaways from the sessions. [These notes are mostly just rambling for my future self. Read on as you wish.]
The good. The layout ran well, with a few minor exceptions noted below, and no cars or locos were harmed in the process.
I've added a few mirrors in the back of the Vortex so crew members can follow their trains more easily when they are traversing the one-turn helix between the lower and upper deck, and that seemed to work well. I've also improved the virtual signal panels that are displayed on the fascia and people had no trouble reading the appropriate virtual signals for CPs where the physical signals were not yet installed.
The bad. Each session had one mystery short that tied up the session for 10 minutes or so. The first was tracked down to an ExactRail gon that had an axle that was intermittently rubbing against a screw head on the coupler box and a wheel flange that was intermittently rubbing against the underframe in curves when the weight of the train behind it was applied. What a PITA is was to track that down. The second was when a sound-equipped SD70ACe ran a trailing point turnout that was lined against it. (Curiously, the short did not clear by backing the train - by hand - off the turnout. It was not until I physically pulled the loco off the tracks that the short cleared.)
The other issue I need to come to terms with is managing the serial staging in the Mojave helix. Southbound trains pile up there and need to be flushed into the storage yard below and it is all to easy to let that slide and to have collisions when people are not paying close enough attention. In one case, a train was parked a foot behind the train ahead of it, but the throttle was unwittingly left at speed step 1 so the train creeped for a foot before rear-ending the train in front of it, sending some cars over the edge. Fortunately there was no damage.
The ugly. Before the sessions, I made a pretty big push to convert some more cars to FVM wheels with one resistor-equipped axle per car. As I started dipping into my newly acquired Scale Trains branded FVM wheels with .540" axles, I soon realized that these do not roll in the 100-ton BLMA/Atlas trucks! (Nor in my MTL 1035 trucks.) WTF? The axle length does indeed check in at .540" on the nose with my callipers, but the BLMA wheels are more like .537-.538" and that seems to make the difference between rolling and not rolling. Boy was I pissed to discover that. I'd be curious to know if anyone else has experienced this.
