Our seventh Piedmont Pilgrimage continued to be just as enjoyable as my other ones. Thankfully, I had my usual 3 full time 'helpers' (Roger and Sherry B., and Bob P). All told, we had 85 people including ourselves, which is another record. Fortunately they were spread fairly evenly over the 4 hour period, so it didn't seem to be overly crowded. The weather was very nice, so I was surprised we had such good attendance. I still haven't made it upstairs during the open houses to see how bad parking is.
As usual I worked my tail off for weeks before trying to get last minute finishing touches in, mainly on the mainline and raised section, as you can tell from previous blog entries. I'm now up to running all 14 loops and the trolley, so I spent about 2 days oiling 27 trains and 30 engines. I am still having minor track issues on the switch tracks in the fall area, but most trains ran on each loop reliably. I decided to run mostly F units. I ran the Polar Express, Thomas, Tinsletown loop Christmas engine, and the LionChief 0x8x0, so the kids would have stuff that they are familiar with and could run.
During the open house, I kept having problems on the raised track with the Williams Pensy F3 that ran perfect last year. I swapped it with an F unit from another track, and then had no more problems. Towards the end of the event, the trolley ran through the bumper, so we had to shut it down. Bob maintained his perfect track record and had problems with both engines he brought over. One ran fine until the screw came out of the front truck. It only took about 20 minutes to find it. The other one wouldn't run at all. The only other problem was 1 coupler let loose on the long freight train on the main line, and we had a major pileup when the engines came around and met the back of the train.
From what I could tell, everyone seemed to have a good time. I know I sure did. Here's what the layout looked like the day of the Pilgrimage.
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