Tonight was my only free night this week so I decided to run a mini op session on the layout and see how it went. I will have between 9 and 12 car spots depending on how I set up the industries.

-3 spots at the lumber dealer

-2 or 3 spots at the manufacturer

-2 hopper spots

-1 or 2 tank spots

-1 or 2 team track spots

I'm leaning toward 3 for the manufacturer, 1 tank, and 2 on the team track. These won't always all be full, but that's what the possibilities will be. As it was there were 5 cars on the layout that I had spotted last week under the guise of testing that all the track worked lol

There is enough space to run around 5 cars on the runaround and I plan to have mostly 5-7 car trains plus caboose to come on and spot so I will not likely be able to run around the whole train at once. I decided to spot 6 cars today, which was complicated by the fact that staging extension isn't built yet, nor is the coal dump trestle which shortens that spur by 2 car lengths.

I found out that I can fit a heavy Mikado and two 40' boxcars on the upper left mainline lead, and just barely at that. I also found out that I need to clean that particular piece of track. The locomotive stalled at the end and wouldn't move, but it worked fine on the first half of it. I will try cleaning it and all the track and see how that works. Power pickup was good everywhere else and I was able to get everything sorted out, even though I took a couple more moves due to the current space limitations. And that's really the goal, so I'm calling it a success! Now time to build some hoppers and tank cars, a coal trestle, and the staging extension so that I can put together a real op session.