BYLONG Operation Night

NOTE: Links to timetable files are to be found at the bottom of this post.

Two nights before they returned home to Texas, Blair Kooistra and Lance Lassen attended an operating night at Bylong.

Others attending were, left to right, sort of:
Bob Merchant (Senior Bob), BobLynch (Junior Bob), Blair Kooistra (at rear), Ron Cunningham (front), James McInerney (centre), Lance Lassen (at rear in orange shirt), Terry Flynn (centre), myself (front in white shirt), Layne Hardy (centre), Des McDonell (towards rear) and Gary Laker (front right). Keiran Ryan turned up later from work after the photo was taken.

Blair has been posting a day by day diary of their train chasing exploits around NSW on his Under the Weather blog (http://undertheweatherblog.blogspot.com/) since he arrived back home and I feel slack about not updating my own blog.

We had a fun night operating Bylong to timetable for the first time since it's recent changes. Everyone was given copies of the timetable and signalmen were allocated to the staging yards and each station with a 'station timetable' to control the passage of trains through their section. We did not operate with a dispatcher although I was available for advice and to troubleshoot as the night went on.

The timetable was run to a 6:1 fast clock and we started well but slowly dropped behind until we were running about a fast hour behind at one stage. I had allowed for this and the middle of the 'day' was quieter and we managed to catch up a bit of time. It later became busy but we finally ended up a bit late.

There was an Up and a Down Pickup Goods as well as an Up and Down Branch Mixed that had to shunt. Blair volunteered to be driver with James McInerney as guard, he must be a masochist!

He did say he had a great time though as he shunted with James' Trainorama 49 class fitted with a Loksound sound decoder from The Model Railroad Craftsman at Blacktown NSW. James had done a lot of adjusting of the CVs and the loco had been programmed with momentum so it was interesting to shunt with.

James also brought along a Trainorama 44 class similarly fitted and adjusted like the 49 and also an Austrains C36 with a Tsunami sound decoder that was so well programmed that it would fall almost silent and drift downhill with only the clank of the side rods to be heard. I really have to ask James exactly what CVs and values he used as my Austrains C36 is also fitted with a Tsunami.

Lance chose to drive a couple of the mainline trains during the session and said he enjoyed himself.

We had two goods trains that needed banking from Kerrabee to the Gulgong staging along with the attendant light engine workings of course.

All in all, things didn't go too badly but I certainly have a couple of things to fix before the next session.

Blair kindly offered to attend the next session..... ;-)

Here are the timetables, train control graph and forms used.

The full timetable.


Individual station timetables.


Train control graph


Modified NSWGR X2010 form used for pick ups consists including shunting instructions.

See if you can find the error in the timetable and train graph, there is a move that wasn't actually possible on the night, I stuffed up.