Most Friday afternoons from 1 - 4 pm are nice quiet times to run trains and sharpen switching skills. But it also serves as a time to set up trains around the layout to get Tuesday night running sessions into operation quickly. Recently, club members agreed to indulge in a slightly more complex switching method called car forwarding. Larry has already provided details covering how this should work in a recent blog. A trial on the first Tuesday night revealed several glitches and the through train will be cancelled for the time being. Here Jim is placing individual cards against appropriate rail cars in an outbound train from Lincoln that indicate a forwarding industrial location for that car rather than bringing all those switched cars back to Wellington or Elsewhere as before. The cars switched out at the forwarded locations will be brought back or reforwarded to another location if they have a card indicating such and so on and so on.
In the photo to the right, the cars and caboose represent an outbound train from Lincoln that would normally have been brought back to Else-where or Wellington yard. Now, you add the cards indicating those rail cars to be forwarded and switch them at the appropriate locations on the way back to the yard. There can also be forwarding cards leaning against cars already in industrial locations. This means, once picked up either by switcher or regular loco, those cars carry on to their new lo-cation.
Feel free to join the fun on any Friday afternoon if you have the time. Call Glen before Friday at 519-539-2403 to ensure that someone with a key will be there or drop in if you see our cars parked in the usual spots.
P.S. Just in case you're wondering, the yellow card lying on the shelf is a Train Order authorizing the use of a switcher at Lincoln Yard. If no switcher is in operation [depending on bodies available on any Tuesday night], you are responsible for switching any Lincoln cars you are dropping off and for adding the switched out cars to your train. As above, you switch any forwarded cars as you carry on.
