Today was probably the best Labor Day ever, unless my memory is getting senile. The weather was perfect, lots of trains were running, and we had a great crowd of visitors enjoying themselves. What more could you want?
We had two steam locomotives operating, as before, along with many other trains. Attendance was huge.
The 308 and 319 were operating again. I was the motorman, with Larry Stone as conductor. We were nearly full on every trip, and never had time to take a break, so we never got around to the usual crew portrait. Sorry, I'm sure you're crushed. But things went well and we both had a great time.
I saw lots of old friends. Phil Hehn was running the 63, Dennis Daugherty and Larry Goerges were there, and so on. With all the various trains running, there were some unavoidable delays, but the visitors seemed more than satisfied. It's always sort of amusing when someone is pleasantly surprised to learn that his ticket is good for unlimited train rides. "Wow, let's ride all the trains we can!"
It takes a large number of people to keep this sort of operating going, and with several unusual features, it's a a challenge.. I can't even begin to list all the people who were involved in operations. Jeff Fryman was the dispatcher, and managed to keep things going well, and keep cool at the same time.
But there's a fly in every ointment. The 308 developed a problem: it seems to be motoring in one direction but not the other. I didn't notice this until late in the day, since the difference between four and six motors is not immediately obvious. With Larry's help, I did some testing, and then I decided to cancel our last trip. We haven't blown a fuse, it can't be a grid and I'm pretty sure it can't be a motor problem, it's got to be something in the reverser. We have several spare reversers of this type (DB-20), so a defective finger or coil can be replaced as needed. By the end of the day, I was not willing to crawl under the car and start investigating further. Next time. I'm sure it's something we can fix.
A pleasure working with you Randy. And every problem has its silver lining leaving me with a couple of hours after we put the cars away and did our little bit of trouble-shooting to play museum guest and get a ride on the caboose train behind the Little Joe.
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