D&J RailRoad
Professor of HO
I hosted an op session on the D&J Railroad today. Things ran great for the 8 hours of ops but then something happened. All but one of the operators had left when I was getting a short somewhere on the layout. The circuit breakers were hammering away trying to bring power back on but shutting down again. I thought it might have been something with a California Zepher that the one remaining operator had just brought out of the main yard with a few Amtrac commuter cars mixed in, but after removing all the cars from the track, the short was still in there somehow. I started checking the rest of the track and found several trains all jammed together at the throat of the division yard. That was the source of the short as some of the locos were derailed and shorting the tracks. The real concern though was; why did all these locos suddenly start moving in the yard? I'm talking about 10 locos, they where MUed together in teams of two and three. Some had pushed their trains into the bottle neck and other locos were on the lead end of the pile up. All of them had been cleared from the throttles when they were parked in the yard. After I cleared the mess, the short was gone and things were back to normal.
Really strange.
Really strange.