Operations with Nick

My oldest son Nick came to visit for Thanksgiving. He’s attending the University of Waterloo so it was nice to have him around for a few days. We did our traditional visits to the Royal Aviation Museum of Western Canada and to Marway Militaria. Nick has a fair amount of N scale equipment (some from my dad’s collection) and hopes to build a layout someday.

He expressed an interest in operating on my layout, and I jumped at the chance. I had never had anyone operate on my layout before!

After cleaning the track and a few locomotive wheels, we were ready for action.

Nick decided to take CP and I took CN.

First up for him was the VIA RDC off the Minnedosa subdivision into Brandon, followed by CP 976, also off the Minnedosa to Brandon.

As he ran his trains, I ran mine. CN 404 was first, working the Manitoba Pool Elevator and Irving Oil.

Working the Manitoba Pool elevator
Working the Manitoba Pool elevator

CN 404 was pulling some cars out of the Pool track before putting the grain cars in.

In the following clip you can see it rolling into Winnipeg (staging) after doing its work. It was pretty long for my layout!

Nick was working Georgetown with demonstrator 769. Unfortunately it derailed due to a misaligned switch. The crew easily rerailed it and carried on.

The roadmaster had a little chat with the engineer afterward about speeds in the yard!

Later, CN 403 was working in Georgetown while a CP freight was also working in Georgetown. This has never happened before, since I can’t run two trains at once by myself!

CN and CP working Georgetown
CN and CP working Georgetown

Note the single grain car spotted at the elevator by CN 404 earlier.

After working in Georgetown, CN 403 proceeded to Helene to work the Cargill elevator. One more clip, showing the train backing into track HI01 with the full train.

Nick shows the finer points of using a tool to uncouple cars…

Uncoupling pick
Uncoupling pick

We operated for about an hour and a half and finished everything up. It was great to have a guest operator and the fact that it was my son made it extra special. Thanks, Nick!

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