Great Northwestern Railway

It's been a temporary setup from the start.  A couple short metal filing cabinets and a scrap piece of plywood.  Add to that an old laptop and that was it - the dispatcher's office!  But a few op sessions quickly showed it was uncomfortable, limited in working space, and looked sloppy.  What to do? The good news is that using the temporary setup showed what was needed for the functionality of the office.  It's a small space - a repurposed hallway that used to go to the kids bedrooms... the same ones that were removed for the layout.  I did not want to remove the hallway as at some point, this will have to be converted back to living space.  So the idea was to cut a single piece of 3/4" plywood into the proper shape, finish it, and set it on stringers attached to the walls.  The desk itself then would have plenty of legroom under.  Experience showed the desk needed a side-table to store the car-card/train packs.   I elected to use bi...

The test op session surfaced the need to have some reliable means of communication between dispatch, the yard masters and the engineers.  In the past, FRS radios were used.  But crews did not like them as they were chatter-boxes, forcing everyone to listen to every conversation. Several of the layouts I had operated on had party line systems between locations.  They are great, and I was planning on developing one of those.  Then I came across a blog post ( https://rgsrr.blogspot.com/2019/05/layout-improvements-flooring-and-phones.html ) where a layout was equipped with a true private automatic branch exchange (PABX); that is, a truly independent phone system where people can call each other directly.  The price was very reasonable, and it would free me up from developing the circuits to do a party line.  Besides, I have a few old land-line phones laying around, so might as well put them back into good use. Arrived yesterday and cannot wait to get it ins...