What? An Operating Session!

Phil, James and Ethan (l-r) work Train 7 At Aquia Landing

It has been a long time since I hosted an operational session. According to my records, the last session was September 5, 2024! (I didn't do a blog post for that session probably because it was part of MARPM and I had to leave my house as soon as the ops were over to go to the hotel for do the final paperwork and payment).

Nick, Jacob and Amby (L-r) work Falmouth

So it was great to host a group of 9 operators on Saturday, 10 Jan 2026 for an official op session on the Aquia Line. That was session number 28. And what a great session it was! The basement was full of laughter and camaraderie as Phil Taylor, James Rodgers, Joel Salmons, Joel Salmons, Remy Salmons, Ethan Rodgers, Jacob Hol, Amby Nangeroni and Nick Ozorak ran the railroad for nearly 3.5 hours. Five of them were first time operators. Remy was only the second woman ever to operate the railroad.

Remy, Joel and John (l-r) at Falmouth

Because we had 9 operators, we ran the normal scheduled trains and an extra. That makes things a bit crowded in the front room when trains meet at Brooke or Stonemans, but everyone seemed to make it work. 

Screen shot of the virtual Aquia Line in Trainz 

Nick is the host "The Roundhouse" podcast. He also builds virtual railroads in Trainz. He brought screen shots of the Aquia Line railroad he is building in Trainz, a virtual model of the Aquia Line. He has been working on that for quite a while. It looks really neat. One of the views he showed me was the layout without the house walls in the way. That was an interesting use of the virtual layout.  After the ops, Nick spent some time taking photos of spots that needed more work in his virtual plan. We also discussed some possible changes to the layout including the foundry at Brooke and the installation of the machine shop at Aquia Landing. When it is done, he will make it available for downloading.  To see more of his podcasting work and virtual railroads go to https://www.youtube.com/@NickOzorak

Nick's concept of the foundry at Brooke. Looks good, but that W&A Car has got to go!

Great Lakes Getaway 2024

I attended Great Lakes Getaway 2024 last weekend. I and 21 other out-of-town guests had the chance to operate on up to 5 great layouts in the greater Detroit area. 

On the first day I operated at Doug Tagsold’s C&S Layout today. It is a spectacularly beautiful model railroad. It is also one of the more complicated Timetable and Train Order layouts that I have run. There is lots to think about as you chug along or wait for meets. I ran an extra ore train that was basically swimming upstream against several scheduled trains. The long runs between control points combined with the slow speeds are unmatched in any model railroad that I am aware. Definitely one of my favorite railroads to operate and visit.

The day capped off with a fun group dinner. The food and company was great but the dang musician was so loud, my ears started ringing. 

View from my office for the day

On the second day I operated on Mike Burgett’s beyond museum quality C&O layout.  I am proud to have contributed to it with some structures and signals via Alkem Scale Models. 

I did my favorite job, West Clifton Forge Yard. That job builds trains and weighs coal hoppers. It all happens from one seated position which I do like.  It really feels like a real railroad when you operate at Mike's. This railroad with its dispatcher office and tower has to rank as one of the best in the country. 

That night I presented an after dinner talk to the group on an update on the Aquia Line.  Travers Stavac also presented his plans for his new layout that incorporates some of Paul Dolkos's former layout. 

Last layout for my trip was Bill Neale’s wonderful PRR Panhandle division. This was my second visit to Bill’s layout. This time I ran a through oil train, and a coal shifter. The pièce de résistance was being engine crew on a massive 45 coal hopper train with three crewmen each running a PRR decapod- 2 on the head and one snapper (aka pusher) on the rear. As an extra treat, Bill’s wife, Terry , provided a tour of their birdfeeders in the back yard and pointed out some of the birds we saw.

Three awesome railroads in 3 days. The Michigan hosts are also great hosts. Thanks to them for hosting a wonderful weekend.

Two decapods on the head and one one the rear with 45 coal hoppers. 

A Haunted Train? Op Session 26

It might still be about 3 weeks until Halloween but some crazy gremlins haunted the layout today. 

It had been about 6 months since the last session. Some of the track was shockingly oxidized and dirty.  It took me about an hour to clean up the track and wheels. But all was ready when the operators arrived.

Previous operators Len White, John Steitz, Ben Sullivan and Kelly Regan joined two first timers, Phil Taylor and Bill Mosteller. They got right to work.

We organized into two 3-man crews. John, Kelly and Bill made up one crew, while Ben, Phil and Len made up the second crew, which events would show to be the jinxed crew.

The first crew ran pretty well except that engine Haupt had some issues about half way through. So I swapped it out with McCallum.

Meanwhile crew two with Engine Fury proceeded well until the first gremlin struck. One of the axles on car 1445 fell out of its truck while switching Aquia Landing. This truck is an arch bar truck that I scratch built. A glue joint between the side frame and bolster failed allowing the side frame to flex and wheel to fall out. It was a simple fix to re-glue the failed joint. This failure never happened before.

Later as that train arrived in Falmouth the draw bar between Fury's tender and engine fell off. This was also an easy fix. It seems that the screw that holds the draw bar had loosened. This also never happened before but again was an easy fix,

Finally, as crew 2 were wrapping up their run for the day, their train stalled in the Clozet tunnel. It was very perplexing as the engine was responding to throttle and seemed normal. It turns out that there was another locomotive in the tunnel. Somehow Engine Whiton was inadvertently energized and left the engine shed. It derailed as it passed the turnout to the engine shed, but continued riding the ties until it entered the tunnel and collided with the other train. I don't think anything like this has happened before. Was it a Halloween ghost train or a rebel attempt to highjack the railroad? 

Other than that, it was a fun session. 

. 

Sprague's Ma and Pa HO layout

Mat Thompson, Paul Dolkos and I had an opportunity to do the first “official” operating session on Bob Sprague's new HO scale Ma and Pa layout. Bob has designed an interesting multideck layout with a counter-flow double helix that connects the various levels. He has beautiful hand laid track, many scratch built structures including some he designed and printed using resin printers. I especially liked his tiny, but flawless running, steam engines and rolling stock appropriate for the 1920s. He also uses digitrax for command and control including remote activation of the turnouts. That was the first time I used that system and I liked it. He has an impressive three-level swing gate made with 80/20 aluminum. It’s very sturdy

Busy Weekend

 This was a busy Father's Day weekend with trains, games, and model building.

John running a passenger train through Winchester 

Wooden fruit boxes under Winchester 

On Friday, Paul Dolkos rode with me to operate on John King's B&O railroad centered around  Winchester, VA. John's layout is wonderful to operate. It hits many of my hot buttons including Time Table and Train Order, Steam, and lots of switching. Paul and I operated the Winchester town switcher. That was a great job with many industries to switch. Winchester was a very busy railroad town with several cold storage facilities for the fruit industry. 

John's track is beautifully laid. He never got around to doing much scenery of structures but he does have lots of interesting mock-ups for the structures in Winchester.  In addition, he has dozens of wooden fruit boxes from orchards and storage houses in Winchester under the Winchester part of his layout. 

B&O Bulletin Book

John has a lot of interesting railroadania. One item that was really neat was a B&O Bulletin book that he uses to have his operators sign. 

On Saturday I participated in a game at Mike Kelly's. He set up a south Pacific scenario involving Japanese infantry guarding American prisoners, a US Navy shore patrol to the rescue, angry local villagers, and man eating animals.   

The game combined elements of role playing and war gaming. He used hidden movement and lots of surprises for both sided.  It turned out our 11-man Japanese squad had to deal with the 25-man shore patrol and 20 unruly prisoners lead by a lone nurse who managed to hide a scalpel on her person. Even the giant crocodile allied with the US Navy. In the end only one Japanese soldier survived to report the outcome to his commander. 

I continued to work on the High Road to Rome diorama too.  It is almost done. Here is a photo showing a vignette from the diorama. A jeep with a wounded soldier is trying to get past the dozer and tanks on the narrow mountain road. This incident is based on Eric Sevareid's report of the actual battle. 

Ops session 25

 

Tim is pulling the pins while conductor John Barry looks on. Meanwhile,
Paul Dolkps tends to his engine.

Five brave operators worked the Aquia Line today for Ops Session 25. We ran one 2-man crew of John Steitz and Amby Nangeroni, and a 3-man crew of Paul Dolkos, John Barry and Tim Tilson. 

This was Tim's  first time operating and he did great. He has nice HO layout depicting the Soo Line in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Tim is also heavily into wargaming. He has written several scenario books for the wargaming hobby.

This was John Barry's first time back on the layout after a long absence.  He quickly picked up where he left off.  Amby got his first chance to be a conductor. He picked it up quickly. He found a few waybills that did not conform to my new track numbering system. We corrected those on the spot. 

Overall this was one of our better sessions. The biggest issue was that Whiton seemed to lose battery power after the first train. We swapped it out and used Haupt.  

The engineer of Haupt ran into a problem when he tried to run into the passenger stub track without first selecting the polarity switch on the  fascia. This switch exists because of the electro-mechanical peculiarities of the area where three turnouts overlap. To keep the electrical power routing to the frogs simple, I have a manual power route to the frog. I really need to come up with an automatic way of routing power to that switch as many of the crews forget to activate the switch when necessary.

We used the random events cars again. The crews selected 4 of them overall. Three of those were some of the more colorful and dramatic events. The example at the left is one. This was just bad luck as about 50% of the cards have no effect. 

None of the guest operators had an iPhone to use the Blunami, so the Eclipse did not get used. The Blunami can be used with a regular DCC throttle, but I am down to only one functional throttle.

The farm boys in the group suggested some kind of lean-to or shelter for the pig pen. I need to further develop that.

During the Op session I was involved in bidding on a set of O scale machine tools for the future machine shop at Aquia Landing. I actually won the bid though with shipping and tax I probably did not get a good deal. But it was an out of production kit and will help me get the machine shop built a lot quicker compared to scratch building all the tools.  I still need a metal planer. Wild West Scale Models is supposed to be working on one of those, so hopefully it will be out before I need it. 

Op Session 24

 

Gerry, Tom and Ben

I organized a last minute operation session for Saturday when my plans for the weekend opened up and Gerry Fitzgerald said he would be in town. This was Ops Session 24 and the first of the new year. 

Gerry was joined by Amby Nangeroni, Paul Dolkos, John Steitz and first time Aquia Line operators Ben Sullivan, Tom Matty, Kelly Regan. With 7 people, we decided to run two trains with 3-man crews and one dispatcher.

Paul, John and Kelly ran one train, while Ben, Tom, and Jerry ran the other. John took a crack at dispatching, but it didn't take much to convince him to let Amby dispatch so he could take out a train.

John, Kelly and Paul

Things worked pretty well. Haupt and Fury seemed to run well. The telegraph fired right up and worked fine.  I saw a few derailments,  some operator induced. No specific bad orders were generated for the rolling stock. However, we did have some humidity contraction issues with the track in Falmouth.  Amby reminded me that this was the first winter op session for Falmouth. I have found that the layout needs a few seasons of humidity changes and tweaking to run the best despite us adding a whole house humidifier to our HVAC when we upgraded it last year.  To resolve some of the issues I had to trim the rail on some turnouts and the to the turntable. We will see if the trimmed rail leads to gaps that are too great in the summer when the wood swells. 

The switch stand for the double slip switch at Falmouth stopped working properly. After I examined it, I realized that the fulcrum for the throw rod popped out of one side of the stand. The only fix is to replace the switch stand. I built a new stand this evening and will install it tomorrow when the paint on it is cured.

Amby dispatching

The crews seemed to enjoy the random event cards. Most of the events did not have an appreciable effect on the operations but added considerable color to the session.  

Alicia made her signature chocolate brownies despite having pulled a muscle in her leg earlier in the day playing pickle ball. The guys loved them. 

NJ-DMV Interchange

 

Dispatcher Office ready to go. You can se the schedule, train sheets and bulletin. 

I hosted an operation session on Friday for visitors from New Jersey. Tom Piccirillo, Andy Brusgard, Tom Schmeider and Mike Quinn arrived at the house for an afternoon session. 

My father at Kennedy Airport

I found it interesting that 3 of the 4 operators were retired police officers. Andy retired after 52 years of service. My dad was a a police officer for the Port of New York Authority, so I feel a kinship with policemen.

Op Session

Tom P. and Andy arrived early so I assigned them train 8 from Falmouth with engine Haupt. We operated under the rule that trains originating from Falmouth with scheduled meets at Brooke are limited to 8 cars maximum. So they left Falmouth with 8 cars.  

Later Tom S and Mike are arrived. They took Train 7 as soon as they read the bulletin.  To their credit, they had read the advanced paperwork and pretty much knew what to do as soon as they arrived despite being first time operators on the Aquia Line.

Train 8 arrived at Brooke for the scheduled meet before 7.  Being the train in an inferior direction, they had to wait for 8 to arrive. It was interesting that 7 needed to pick up a car at Brooke and 8 had a car to drop. So, the crews coordinated their actions to expeditiously do the job. 

Andy and Tom P - both had operated here before

Train 8 continued on but forgot to drop off two cars for Stoneman's. They decided to take the cars to Falmouth, vice flagging and backing up to Stoneman's, and then back haul them to Stoneman's when they departed Falmouth. This is not ideal because now the drop required a facing point move and they had to use the extended couplers on the nose of the engine. The extended links are more difficult to use than the regular link and pins, but they got it done.

Meanwhile, train 7 arrived at Aquia Landing. Unfortunately, at that point engine Haupt started to malfunction despite running fine beforehand. After some unsuccessful debugging, we switched engines McCallum for Haupt, and they attempted to finish their run. They assembled the train 9, but never did run it as they ran out of time as they had to leave to check into the hotel. 

Mike and Tom S.

The dispatcher annulled train 9, but Tom S. and Mike wanted to stay and finish their run with train 10. I have noticed in the past few sessions that the longer trains that we now run take a lot longer to work. I may need to adjust the schedule if we continue to find that the scheduled times are insufficient.  The link and pin couplers definitely slow down the process, especially for new crews.  

The random events procedure worked well. The crews pulled three cards. Two were minor events with no operational effect. The third card for crew of 10 required them to stop at Potomac Creek for 10 minutes to load troops whose enlistments were expiring.

Other than the Haupt issue, the ops session went well.

Mat Thompson hosted a group dinner at his house on Friday night. The group dinner is always a highlight of the NJ-DMV Interchange weekend. Mat's layout is also a nice treat to see too. 

Greg Viggiano observes John Steitz  running trains
during the open house 

Open House

On Saturday I hosted an open house for the NJ-DMV folks plus local friends. About 15 folks arrived to se the layout. John Steitz, Mike Spoor and Amby Nangeroni ran trains while the guests looked around and asked questions.

Alicia made chocolate brownies which were all gone by the end of the open house

Problems

We discovered that Whiton, one of my  Mason engines with battery power was sparking on the tender trucks. The engine continued to run despite the sparks. The shorts on the tender trucks is  a common problem with the Masons from SMR Trains.  It may be due to the insulating paint wearing off the brass parts as the engines operate. Charlie Taylor also reports similar problems with his SMR Masons. I need to add insulation washers to all the Mason engines. I am also thinking about making make new 3D printed resin trucks for these engines. The resin will help eliminate some of these intermittent electrical shorts. Also, Engine Oscela has a broken wire to the front truck that I need to repair. 

John Steitz reported that the passenger car was picking frogs when he was running. It had not been doing that when I ran it, so I need to check it out. 

Crunch Time, Again

 The NJ-DMV Interchange is scheduled for this weekend. So local layout owners are in crunch time getting ready for the meet. I have been doing some tasks to help others to get ready. My layout is ready to go except for some minor repairs such as a broken switch stand from a last op session. 

One of the embellishments to operations on my railroad that I wanted to get done was to make random events cards.  I wrote about this idea earlier in this post. 

Last night I printed a set of random event cards. Most of them involve delays of some duration, longest is 15 minutes. A few require cars to be set out. About one third have no operational impact. 

I am trying to decide how to trigger the random event.  For now, I am going to place them near Brooke Tunnel and Stares Tunnels. Each train will draw a card when the pass Brooke going southbound or Stares Tunnel going northbound. That why I can have one box near both tunnels to house the cards. I am curious to see how they work out.

Meanwhile, I have been helping Marty McGuirk with building the paper mill for his layout.  

About 2 months ago I helped Marty with a redesign of the paper mill area of his layout to better match the prototype he was trying to model. The drawing shows the design I proposed to him.  You can see that the mill is a large complex and will be an important location for operations on his layout.

The clapboard building is 30 by 12 inches with some compression to fit the layout. The full prototype size in HO is about 36 by 12 inches. There are other structures in the complex that will be nearly as big. 

The photo below shows the first batch of laser cut parts that I cut for the building while they are in the glue up. Marty will install the windows and roofs. There are several other big buildings in the paper mill complex.

I have also been helping Doug Gurin with his layout design. He wants to have a refined drawing to show to the visitors this weekend.

 I also have a small modeling project to complete for Henry Freeman as he will be in town to operate and  pick up this model.

In between all that, I made some progress on the Pungy. I painted the hull and added stem and stem head. Next  I will install the railings and deck furniture. But that will have to wait until the weekend is over.

ACWRRHS Op Session 2022

 

Staged and Ready to Operate 

Eight members of the ACWRRHS, Thom Radice, Charlie Taylor, Phil Reuhl, Marty Vaughn, DC Cebula, Ken Starcher, John Bopp, and David Bjorkman,  visited the Aquia Line today. We concluded a successful day of operating the railroad in morning and afternoon sessions. Everyone seemed to have a great time. The railroad ran well. I spent about an hour the night before giving all the track a thorough cleaning. That helped with the DCC engines like Haupt. The new battery in Whiton worked well. Fury also ran well. 

I was concerned about the number of cars being insufficient, but everything seemed to worth well. The sidings were not so choked with cars that might cause delays. We ran trains ranging from 10 cars to an engine leaving Falmouth light but making pickups along the way. 

Everyone agreed that the new Falmouth is a big improvement to the layout.  This railroad is simple in design, but relatively complex in operations when you consider the link and pins, proper whistle signals, using the telegraph, maintaining the paperwork, and deciding how to do the switching moves. The Time Table and Train Order aspect is fairly simple, but still has it nuances.

The infamous 10-minute rule  came up for discussion again as many trains were running late.  

"No Train having the right to the Road must leave any station or passing place, where by the schedule it should pass a train, until Ten Minutes after its own time per schedule; and this ten minutes (allowed for variation of watches) must be observed at every succeeding station until it shall have passed the expected train; and no portion of the ten minutes allowed for variation of watches must be used by Trains running in either direction. "

Phil suggested that the first phrase means the rule applies to the priority direction, which is southbound i.e. loaded. So we now interpret  this phrase  to mean that southbound trains in the superior direction can pass a planned meeting point if the inferior train they were supposed to meet is more than 10 minutes late.  

I love how operators find new ways to operate the layout, ways that I did not think about.

We did detect some problems.

•     Whiton was shorting intermittently in the tender trucks. We could see sparks. Because it was battery powered, it kept right on chugging, but I need to fix the problem. Charlie suggest insulating washers.
•     One turnout switch stand broke as I did not properly clear the ballast and glue from it. Luckily it was not in a critical spot and we could operate by had.
•     The telegraph signal from Falmouth was at times weak. I don't understand how that can be as there is a power supply in the telegraph office to power the sounder. So why Falmouth was weak while the others were fine is a mystery to me.

Here is a short  video of the guys working the railroad. Thom Radice looked quite dapper in his period attire.  Thanks to everyone for attending.  Now I look forward to a long nap. The last few nights were long and the mornings early!

First Op Session Since COVID

Amby switching the first revenue train at Falmouth

The Aquia Line hosted its first Ops Session since the start of COVID and the expansion of the railroad.  Amby Nangeroni, Leonard White, and Jacob Hol were the gallant volunteer operators. I acted as trouble shooter and official napper.  I maintained a log of problems encountered by the operators.

Leonard and Jacob working number 7 at
Aquia Landing 

The good news is that Fury, with its battery power, operated without trouble. Haupt with DCC and keep alive started off fine at Falmouth but started experiencing  sporadic stalls on the rest of the layout. The trouble was a result of dirty wheels and track as I didn't have time to thoroughly clean them.

The conductors check their paperwork

We also tested Whiton, McCallum and Osceola. We discovered that Whiton's Li-Po battery had popped. Good thing it didn't catch on fire. So I swapped it out and it worked fine. McCallum and Osceola also ran fine in limited testing, but I did spot a broken wire to Osceola's front pilot truck. I will fix that. Osceola is reserved for use by the Commanding General as its pulling power is insufficient for use on regular trains.

Two trains with 10-cars each at Brooke is a problem.
The operators had to saw by using the stub siding

I made a note that all track and engine wheels should be cleaned before the next session. 

We found box car 2429 with tight wheel gauge on the brake truck. Also 1344 needs new trucks, but I know that car was problematic.

The telegraph worked well. Once the engines were on the road, the messages were fairly constant. I may need a dispatcher as an active job in future ops sessions.  

Having meets with two 10 car trains at Brooke is a problem. The siding isn't long enough. Today the crews had to saw-by each other. The ultimate solution would due to extend the siding, but that would be difficult in the current track plan.  The short term solution is to move the meet to Stonemans. 

Amby runs the first revenue train over the new expansion

All in all the session went pretty well.  I need to clean the track and wheels better before the next session. Thanks for my gallant helpers. Thanks also to Alicia for making some great Ghirardelli chocolate brownies.

First Train to New Falmouth

When the glue under the bridge dried, I spent a good part of Thursday installing the rail over the bridge and connected it to the rest of the layout.  It took me about 8 hours to do the work, but I had to take a lot of breaks as I was feeling some mild side effects from a COVID booster shot. But, I was able to get all the track and spikes on this section complete. I figure that I can lay and spike about one foot per hour. That includes 4 spikes per tie.

Friday was a busy day as Amby arrived to finish wiring the bus and feeders and I worked on the scenery at Falmouth. We had an issue with my second booster. Amby thinks the second booster may be shorting the first booster, probably due to a fault in my wiring. Fortunately, the layout works fine with just one booster. I generally run 2 or maybe 3 engines at a time. My two work horse locos are battery powered and they run through shorts and other minor problems. So we should be OK.

With the wiring sorted out using one booster, Amby took the throttle with me as the conductor.  We ran a 7 car train into Falmouth. We used the main line as the arrival track as the arrival track had 3 cars parked on it. Those cars required Amby to make some extra moves to clear the main, get to the turntable, reverse the engine, run around the train. Pick up some cars and head out of town.

Amby was the first operator to OS a train into Falmouth using the telegraph system. Everything worked pretty well as long as the conductor made sure the switches were set correctly. 

After Amby departed, I continued with adding the scenery at Falmouth. Since this part of the layout is a narrow shelf, there is a lot less vertical relief. But I did cut away some of the fascia to provide a hint that the yard at Falmouth is adjacent to the creek.

 

Telegraph Problems - now and 159 years ago

Steve Williams, Amby and I had a zoom conference today to discuss the fix to the telegraph stations on the longer cables. They came up with two simple solutions that should work. We will try them next Monday.

We also briefly discussed possible upgrades to the software. We will sort that out further once we have some operating experience.  I was thinking it might be fun to have the random messages lead to things that the dispatcher would have to react to and not just for ambience.  That would require  the dispatcher to translate the random messages and decide what to do. 

I have been listening to the random messages as I work on my computer. They arrive suddenly and often I miss the first sentence as I prepare to copy.  To make that translation easier, the random messages should have a preamble like the others. W-W-W - EoW is perfect.  Also, the message would have to be repeated until acknowledged. 

If we do this, I would need to compose messages that need action. Others can just be for ambience and or information.

The type of action the dispatcher could take include, order out an extra, such as the General’s special, set up a meet, tell a train to pick up a certain car , etc. Since the telegraph system is one way, the DS would write the message on a paper message slip and place it manually on the layout for the conductors to pick up.

We will see how hard it will be to upgrade the software. I am sure Steve could do it, but how do we get the new code into the installed stations? We may have to learn how to program the Arduinos. That looks more complicated that I want to take on, but every journey begins with the first step.

Meanwhile, we are not the only Aquia Line telegraphers to have problems. I found this letter while going through my files. I believe this letter was in a book in the Library of Congress that contains many of Herman Haupt's letters transcribed as well as some seemingly original, or at least hand written messages, from Haupt's records. Those messages were donated to the LoC by one of Haupt's sons well after the war. This is a link to the citation https://lccn.loc.gov/mm73025296 

If you can read this, you can see that W.W.Wright is complaining to Haupt about being unable to get reliable service from the telegraph. I believe this was because regular Army traffic was monopolizing the telegraph. This was after the battle of Chancellorsville and the Army was actively campaigning. 

 Letter from W.W. Wright to General Haupt

In that same batch of letters was this one from Haupt to Wright discussing how trains own the Aquia Line  were delayed to pick up wounded. The Army medical officers were using an ad hoc system to load wounded that was delaying the USMRR trains. Haupt would not have that!

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