Mystic
Mountain Railroad Operating Sessions
Some videos from my operating sessions
April 2015
Sept. 2015
August 2016
June
2018
How Operations Came to My Mystic Mountain
Garden Railroad
The Mystic Mountain Railroad, a back country shortline loosely
set in the early 1900’s, is my second garden railroad and was
built in 1999. As are most garden railroads it was built
primarily to run trains round and round without intervention. It
was 600’ of track with three passing/storage sidings and 4
spurs, which were mainly included for ascetics to create small
scenes and park cars for display. In 2004 I added another 600’
of track which created an independent or linked loop to run a
second train. It also included a small yard, a turntable and a
few spurs.
This was fine until around 2012 when I went to a local
convention and signed up for an operating session at an indoor
railroad. I was curious and wanted to find out what it was all
about. I really enjoyed it! Over the next year I went to a
couple of other operating sessions and started to think of how I
could do one on my Mystic Mountain garden railroad. I built an
Excel spreadsheet with lists of cars, locomotives, and
industries that scheduled car movements among the industries. It
was clumsy to use buy I hosted a couple of operating sessions
for club members. People had fun and I learned a lot about what
worked well and what didn’t.
I embarked upon a major renovation in 2014 to make the railroad
work better for operations, adding some new spurs and
industries. But it was more a matter of re-thinking the use of
the existing layout. I broke the round-and-round loop
(schematically, not physically) by declaring a section unused or
for staging a train. I added a switching area that would
intentionally be challenging to switch cars. I re-purposed a
crossover as an entry to the south end of the railroad. I
redefined the track through the turntable to be a destination.
Simplifying the helix allowed me to create a wye for turning
trains and making meets and switching in the area more
“interesting”. The MMRR now has two yards, 27 spurs, two wyes
for turning trains, several passing sidings, and 26 industries
some with multiple car spots. Trains can be run point-to-point
between the two yards for realistic operating sessions or from
each yard to the middle of the RR, turn around, and return to
their origins.
After investigating a few commercial train scheduling programs I
chose the JMRI operations module, entered all my cars and
locations/industries, and created several routes for trains to
travel servicing industries along the way. For an operating
session (usually 4 crews of 2 persons each) I select a set of
trains to run that will interact in interesting ways (I can vary
the level of difficulty to match the experience of the crews)
and JMRI generates switch lists for each train. These lists show
each potential stop along the route of that train and the cars
to drop and pick up at each location. Trains are battery-powered
radio controlled for smooth, walk-around control.
While single person crews are the usual, I prefer 2-person
crews. Because of the enhanced social interaction, it just seems
like more fun! Since we don’t have a dispatcher to manage
mainline use on the railroad, we just let the crews negotiate
shared use of an area, meets and passes, etc. Sessions usually
last about 2-3 hours. After each session we socialize with
munchies and then debrief operations learning what to improve
for next time. One idea this surfaced was to pre-build the first
train out of each yard so that all four crews could get started
working the railroad in the first 10 minutes.
If operations sounds like it MIGHT interest you, try it and find
out. Check your local club to see if someone there is doing
operations. There’s a lot more operations activity in the
smaller scales. Sign up for a session at a local NMRA
convention. Or find a friend in the smaller scales that can
invite you to a session.
New 2018 Track Plan
Track Schematic
Copyright © 2018
Mystic Mountain Arts