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 … Read more

Operating on the Bayside & Tidewater

I was on Prince Edward Island recently for work. Shortly before I left Manitoba, I mentioned to Chris Mears and Taylor Main that I was headed for the island, and they invited me to join them for the Half Nuts operations group on Sunday evening. They meet regularly and operate on one of two layouts in the … Read more

CP 949 and CP 975

After the last operating session, I had two more trains to run: CP 949 (Winnipeg to Brandon via Georgetown); and CP 975 (Brandon to Minnedosa) Both are fairly limited in the switching they do in Georgetown, so they were quicker than CP 948 in particular to run.   CP 949 The instructions for CP 949 … Read more

Second Operating Session with Car Cards

After my first operating session with car cards, I made one significant change, then started running some CP trains. Here are a few videos showing the trains. Train Information Card I added a train information card to the front of the card packet. This gives the train number, origin and destination of the train, departure time, … Read more

Car Cards and Operations

I recorded a video to talk about the car cards I am trying out for my layout. I am going to use it to run through a trial operations session to see how well it works. In this video I show the car cards I am using, the card pockets I installed around the layout, and … Read more

Industrial Spur Lengths

Many model train layout designers try to have the maximum spur lengths they can, to maximize how many cars can sit at the industry, and therefore maximize their train lengths. There’s nothing wrong with this but you should consider how the industry actually uses the spur. I’ll give an example: the grain elevator spur in Georgetown on … Read more

Timetables, Revision 7

Here are PDF copies of the latest CN and CP employee timetables for my model train layout: CN timetable / CP timetable