Caleb Comes to Operate

My friend Caleb Wentzell was in Winnipeg for a few weeks, taking a course over in Transcona with his employer, CN. He had been watching my YouTube layout videos and wanted to operate my layout.

To be honest, I was a little nervous, because nothing had turned a wheel on my layout since late in 2018. You may have noticed a distinctive lack of posts here and videos on my channel. I’ve been super busy with other things and really haven’t had the time nor the inclination to do anything on my layout, so it’s been idle, gathering dust.

The first order of business was cleaning! I found my track cleaning eraser and got to work with that, then ran a “work train” over the layout with CN 3665 pulling a track cleaning boxcar to try to finish the job.

After a brief tour of the layout, I gave him the NCE controller and he got to work. He was familiar with NCE’s Power Cab already so he had no issue there. I acted as his conductor, throwing the switches and uncoupling the cars while he operated the throttle and planned the moves.

He did very well, as he should, since he’s a conductor with CN and is far more familiar with train operation than I am! He commented that my track plan at Georgetown is deceptively simple but has a lot of operation built into it. I was pleased with that assessment, as I am also happy with the Georgetown setup. Just a few industrial spurs can lead to a lot of operation!

A couple of hours later, he had run all of the trains and the day was done.

Thanks for coming over, Caleb!