Building and operating the Atlantic Inland

 Several years ago I attended an ops weekend and I want to concentrate on learning clerks jobs. I chose my layouts based on a layouts clerk job, and I made a big effort to make sure everyone attending could have the clerks job if they wanted it, or we could split it. I volunteered to forgo taking the clerks job if anyone else wanted it. What happened was at each layout no one else expressed a desire to have the clerks job. Great! After the ops event it got back to me that a number of people complained that I got the clerk job at each layout, and that it was unfair that I had done this. I had made a big effort to give anyone who wanted the clerks job the opportunity to take it. No one stepped up. It appears that when I sincerely offered to pass on the clerk position, everyone assumed I had strong-armed my way in and they didn’t want to step up and be the person to take that position away from me. My feelings were hurt, and I have never returned to this region for an ops event si...

 I spent the free time I had in the last couple days drawing detailed plans of all the yards and switching districts on the new layout. I am a graph paper, pencil, ruler, and eraser guy. No cad. Mistakes are erased, or when large enough, like omitting the entire third track through the west end of the layouts urban area, a cause to re-draw the entire thing.  I have templates, downloaded from the internet, of most turnouts, so I can allow the correct amount of space. Walther’s on-line catalog has most of the footprints of the structures they carry, and I use these in nearly every case, to help with layout.  I like kitbashing structures, so many times the exact footprint won’t work. Usually I allow a generous amount of space for a footprint. After doing this a few times wrongly, on AIR1, I got pretty good at doing it right. There is always going to be a mistake somewhere.  In those cases something has to go, usually track. I’ve made a rule that aisle space is never to ...