Silicon Valley Lines ran another operations session with remote operators and a socially distanced skeleton crew in the layout room. This time around the technology worked smoothly. The upgraded Internet connection performed well and we had sufficient bandwidth to run video conference sessions and Youtube Live stream in parallel. The screenshot above shows the cab view perspectives from passenger train 18 in Igo controlled by a club member in the UK as its getting passed by passenger train 111. High priority train 104 is holding in Jacksonville for train 18 to get moving again. Meanwhile train 102 is ready to depart in Windsor pending assignment of a remote operator.
Two local operators took care of switching assignments. An on-site brakeman worked with remote operators to assist with easy switching chores, or if there were derailments. The Nowheres Yardmaster set up or broke down trains. I worked the A/V job and helped out with brakeman duties as necessary. I spent most of the evening in front of computer screens.
I went back to the control stand setup I used in June, since that proofed to be the approach with the least problems. The 17" MacBook Pro in the middle is running OBS, acts as the hub for all the cameras, and feeds the layout views to the participants on Google Meet via the OBS Virtual Camera, streams to Youtube Live, and keeps a local recording of the session. This laptop also bridges the audio from Meet into the Youtube stream and the recording.
The old Dell Inspiron on the right is also logged in to Google Meet and acts as the bridge for the FRS radios. After lots of trial and error I determined that the TRRS audio socket on the MacBook Pro does not activate the microphone input when I plug in the radio, probably due to the radio output not matching expected impedance. The Dell has separate microphone and speaker sockets and doesn't try to do anything fancy. This setup also allowed me to wear an ear bud for radio communication, while at the same time listen on the video conference with another ear bud and debug problems bridging the audio on the fly.
Finally, the 15" MacBook Pro on the left is set to the Youtube Live Control Room. I can observe stream quality, concurrent viewers, etc. as well as watch and add comments on the live stream.
The recording of the live stream is linked below. Watch it on the Youtube site to get a playback of the live comments, too.
The technology worked. What can we do better next time? Watching the stream it's pretty obvious that we need to be a bit more formal in our communications protocol to allow for effective radio traffic.
The lag between the FRS radio VOX feature to enable / disable the radio transmitter is causing confusion.
For the next session and the Open House in November we will need to think some more about how having a host for the event.
Overall, this was a fun session. We had many participants both on the live stream and the video conference, and I'm particularly pleased that with the upgraded Internet capacity a lot of the the technical problems we had in earlier sessions got addressed.
[ FREMO posts ] This is the bar to meet when modeling an apple harvest. Unbelievable attention to detail and lively scenes. Over the course of the meet I came back to "the curve" several times to take another look. Very inspiring.
Generator 5 was installed in the underground cavity of plant 1 at Snoqualmie Falls in 1905. It has a generation capacity of 5600 kilowatts. It uses a Francis turbine, which is more efficient than the Pelton wheels used in the other 4 generators installed at plant 1. The water enters the turbine from the sides and then falls straight down from the center of the turbine into a draft tube. The energy of the flowing water is transferred to the shaft of the turbine in form of torque. The shaft is connected to the generator, visible in the rear in the photo at the top of this post. In 2011 the plant was modernized and generator 5 was moved from plant 1 to the hydropower museum. "Wow!" The shops building was moved here from its original site and has various artifacts and equipment that was removed from the plant's underground cavity and control room. Control panel. Knife switches.
[ Three Tunnels and Winter ] Kandersteg station has the control tower right on the platform at track 1. However, it appears the big control table is no longer in use. Instead, everything's controlled via computers in a back room. Here's the line diagram schedule. This photo was taken through two windows and blinds, so unfortunately it's hard to make out train indications. However, I believe the rather tight column of red lines in the middle of the screen represents the auto transport trains traversing through the Loetschberg tunnel. As soon as the sun disappears behind the mountains, it gets cold. I didn't want to stand here for another 30 minutes until the RegioExpress to Bern was due, so I decided to take the RE 4275 through the Loetschberg tunnel to Goppenstein, where I'd have about 5 minutes to get to the other platform for the return trip and on to Bern. While waiting for the RegioExpress, this KLV train with double-header DB class 185 barrels through the stat...
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