Last night a bunch of mates (and their wives) from the Corris turned up to play trains. After drinking and dining on the terrace we headed upstairs to the railway room. Normally playtime is just buggering about running whatever takes our fancy, but for last night I thought I'd put a bit of effort in beforehand. First step was a better tidy up than usual (not set the bar too high then) followed by a quick look at
2D53, in particular the timetable section, Cambrian Coast, winter 75/76. It gave me a framework to hang on fictional trains that I wanted to blend into the real services of the time. As well as putting together a believable timetable, I added signs to give a sense of location and made sure that coupling hooks, bright led torches and reading glasses were deployed at strategic locations.
Now ordinarily I struggle with the notion of being organised, I like creative chaos and don't fit well with structure, but the session went quite well once we got into it. I really needed an extra DMU but the pattern of service of trains in alternate directions during the working day meant that we could get by with one unit shuttling back and forth, at least until it failed. It gave an excuse for further running of a loco and two Mk1s to fill the gaps. Extra trains up the branch and engineers working gave opportunities to get tied up in knots and a spirited debate about the rights and wrongs of leaving the brake van on the main while shunting.
Was it a success? Today I've made a start on snagging, to sort out why stuff derailed where it did. I'm only part way through the list but have already sorted three track defects that looked to be sporadic one offs until regular running highlighted repeat problems. But even allowing for these problems the railway has run better than usual as I spent quite some time just doing the basics like thoroughly cleaning the track. I'm not sure that I'd want to do timetables that often, without scenery the unadulterated passage of DMUs back and forth, which happens for quite a bit of the day, can lack interest after a while.