Model Railway
a. Layout
b. Locomotives
c. Cars
d. Operating
e. Summaries
Photos
Daley Train Log
Page 111
I am now about to begin running my first trains under Session 1 of Ship It!.
The goal at the moment is to determine what problems arise before I begin really running a sequence of operational trains.
A number of difficulties arose immediately. One was that the locomotive (CN6700) would stall in a number of spots within the Jasper Yard. I was not too surprised by this as it has been a few months since I last ran any trains on the layout. I then cleaned the track using both the BrightBoy eraser as well as the liquid Track Cleaning fluid. This seemed to solve this problem.
One new car, SRLX 15287, a Swift refrigerator car, derailed repeatedly in the Yard, so I have removed it from service until I can fix this.
Siding #1 in the Jasper Yard must be clear in order to move the passenger cars into place for the final consist of Train 100.
Finally Train 100 (travelling East) left the Jasper Yard, looped around the Jasper townsite, and headed over the wooden trestle and onto the mainline. The cab speed was set at 18. The train made 10 complete loops before entering the Coaldale Yard. The train was left on the passing siding and will convert to Train 101 when it leaves Coaldale later in the day, this time traveling West to Jasper. In order to reverse the direction of the route the train will use the reversing loop near Pine Ridge and then travel counter-clockwise around the mainline.
Overall, this seemed to work.
I have just realized that although the switching list is in the order of train number, it makes more sense to review the various trains in the order at which they would actually run.
The first train to leave a station is Train 601, a Local Freight train, which will travel from Coaldale to Wild Rose - Queenston - Prairie Dog - Pine Ridge - Black Diamond - Jasper.
Oh oh. The switchlist fails to identify a locomotive for this train, although it does give a caboose number. Now to have a look at Switch It! to see if I can see what might have caused this.
Found the problem. The Ship It! window for Browsing Trains - View Motive Power -Train capacity had the information reversed for where to pick up and drop off the locomotive. This has been corrected.
There was a similar problem for Trains 400, 401, 600, 700 and 701.
I have rerun Ship It! with the same starting positions and now have a new, improved, switching list.
A close look at my switching list indicates two problems: the cars are not at the same starting positions and it seems that I have a similar problem with the placement of my cabooses that I had with my locomotives.
I have made a few changes to the Ship It! database for some of my cabooses and have rerun the initial placement of cars and the Session 1 switching list. I still need to print these out.
This has been a good day as I begin to remove the bugs caused by some simple mistakes in the initial setup of my database.
I spoke too soon! While working with my Ship It! files, they suddenly became corrupted (I think it may have been caused by the system running into difficulty with the virus protection which then interrupted Ship It!). The result is that I could no longer read my files. Fortunately I did have a backup from two weeks ago but this still means that I have lost all of the settings that I have made since then. This is going to take awhile to recover. This is the first time that this has happened to me.