Operations on the M&K

Let's talk a little bit about how you operate the M&K. Where does it begin, where does it end? The railroad actually begins at that tunnel. So there's a big hidden yard over there, and we make three circuits around the layout, and then we go into a tunnel over there that takes us to the other end of the yard. Now with such long trains, we don't do a lot of switching with those trains. We have a yard over here that's visible, where we make up trains and break them up, and there's where we prepare our locos to run around and make our switching runs. It works pretty well, at least we've had a good time doing it so far. The layout is an island. Why did you choose that particular design as opposed to having it against the wall? Well, I wanted the engineer to be able to follow his train and stay with it. And we use walk-around throttles with memory. And the engineer can stay with his locomotive for the entire trip. If we had've put it against the wall, we would've had large portions where he would not have been able to do that. That's a question that I still don't know whether we did the best thing, but we enjoy it the way it is. Well, is there something you'd do differently about the layout? You've been working on it for 20 years. Have you come up with better ideas that you would say, "Oh, if I had've thought of that 20 years ago "I would've done such and such?" I guess the only thing that I could answer, I would make a change, I would've put double track over the mountain instead of some of those single tracks. We have a lot of fun operating the single track but the real one used more tracks over the mountains than it did in the flat lands. How often do you operate? We operate, we try to operate once a month. And then we work on the layout three weeks a month. What kind of operating system do you use? Well, we have car cards for the real operating scheme that we have here is loads east and empties west. This railroad's principally a coal hauler. They're hauling coal to the east coast ports and they're bringing empties back to the mines. And that's what our principal traffic is. We still have passenger traffic, but it's a far cry from what it used to be years ago. And you obviously try to operate in a prototypical manner, because everything on this layout is prototypical. We're trying. We're not as good at that as we are at some of the other things.