Operation

As part of the whole Paekakariki saga, which will slowly play out over an increasing amount of time hopefully if I get more work, I've been doing a bit of thinking about the operation of the whole shebang. While at home its fine, as I can just potter to my hearts content while having a few brews, if/when its in an exhibition situation things will be entirely different. Doing the numbers reveals that to run the system properly there would have to be at least 3 operators who knew exactly what was going on. Doing that all day is pretty full on and its normally hard enough to round up a group of people to allow you to have 2 people operating at once. I was therefore interested to come across this yesterday on RMWeb.

Reading pre-war accounts of Maybank, the first serious terminus to fiddle yard layout, it seems that at exhibitions Bill Banwell and Frank Applegate ran a twenty minute sequence timetable at set times every hour "The next demonstration will be at...." possibly with a break for lunch. In between runs they were free to discuss their 0 gauge layout with visitors and maybe that's not a bad idea. Most modern exhibition layouts are run as burlesques with performers on stage all the time but no particular narrative but there are other ways of doing it.

Personally I like the idea of having a period (maybe an hour or so) of intense operation, followed by a break time where maybe you would leave a railcar running on the roundy roundy, or people have a play around with things in no particular order. Its quite hard to keep running trains for several hours, let alone a full day unless you are flush with warm bodies to man the trenches.