Train Blog
January 25, 2026
ead Actor (glancing through the curtain at a packed hall): “This will be the greatest production of Romeo & Juliet the stage has ever seen!” House manager: “Your lead actress called in sick and there is no understudy.” Lead Actor: “Gack!” So this Saturday Night Special, we had a lot of pre-signups. I was in the back getting the clock, my computer, and my trainee ready, going over everything while writing the pre-warrants. See, there is a trick to the opening moves on the LM&O. Basically, there is a freight and passenger train coming out of Cincinnati (possibly followed by coal […]
January 18, 2026
ears back, I used to ride by bike over to Dick Sturm’s house to either work on his layout or run ops. It wasn’t a long ride, about two miles if that, but it was nice to ride home on cold winter nights after playing with trains. Anyway, wiggled an invite with the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders for a Saturday session and decided to ride over – this time the ride was seven and change, with the worst part on their end (a quarter mile on Aloma sidewalks, with all sorts of traffic. Anyway, made it there safely and they […]
January 13, 2026
ur report actually begins a day earlier. Our club has recently dipped our rail joiners into T-Trak. It’s very easy and popular (and a hell of a lot simpler than them wooden Trojan horses we built in our N-Trak days). So the evening pre-show, Shannon and Zeus (two n-trak knuckleheads) were out at the fairgrounds setting up. It went together pretty easy (even though there was a case of elevated curves being installed backwards, turning them into escape-velocity curves). But the new layout was pretty much up and running in time for the show. That being said, the show went […]
January 12, 2026
o this is evening session of Zeus and my two-for-Thursday operations marathon. After finishing up wrecking the Virginia Southwestern, we raced up I-4 to get to Tom Wilson and our session on his Pittsburgh & West Virginia. This is a coal-hauling, steel-making layout with a heavily-traveled main line and long branch up to Mifflin and Clariton, all serving a gigantic mill complex. We were the first to arrive – found host Tom trying to string intercom cables like a sapper under artillery fire. When we couldn’t get it to work, I told him to just seat me at a tiny […]
January 12, 2026
convention was held in Cocoa this weekend – Protorails. While I couldn’t attend (I had a train show to manage in Deland over the weekend) I picked up a dispatcher request for two railroads hosting sessions for the con, both on the same day. So the first was the Virginia Southwestern, John Wilke’s fabulous coal hauler. And since it’s a dual line with shared trackage, I was able to weasel a second free pass for Zeus H, a young dispatcher I’ve sessioned with in the past. The only problem here was that he got stuck in the Amsterdam snow disaster […]
January 1, 2026
es, so this is it, my last session for 2025 (unless someone calls in the next few minutes and I’m grabbing my throttle bag and running for the car). Anyway, I thought about going over to the clubhouse and running a quick session by myself. But I opened the invitation up – looks like everyone else was busy and I got one guy – Shemp. But that’s fine. This is the thing. This year, I ran in room-packer club sessions with 30+ people all working in tight harmony to get through the simulated day. I ran on structured layouts that […]
December 22, 2025
his fine day started in the crew beanery where we were served Louisiana dishes (I think it was gumbo and something else that looked like gumbo, a roadkill mix of good eatin’. Why we were eating southern in preparation for an Oregon run, I’ve no idea. But it’s good eating, far better than anyone (save Rob Gross) serves up (the Tuscarora? Two packages of sugar-free cookies). For all my snark, I did snark down too much, feeling bloated all session. Should have brought that up in the debrief. So Zach was dispatcher and I was running road. I did have […]
December 21, 2025
t’s getting into the holidays, people are traveling, holding parties and such, so scraping up a session is getting difficult. As it was, the December 20th running of the Farnham’s Florida East Coast was a close-run thing. He got just enough people to run a casual session together – no dispatcher, sorta TT&TO style. The day was nice, we opened the doors and went to work. My first run was 930, the busy Titusville out-n-back. I really had a good time with this one – it was very overloaded (the Nehi bottling plant had a occupied dock and four cars […]
December 18, 2025
ears back in the 60s, there was a term on everyone’s lips (there were no feeds then) – “Generation Gap”. As it was, until the 50s, kids and teenagers were seen as simply “young adults”. They wore the same clothing, cut their hair the same, and the only men (and no women) with tattoos were in in the Merchant Marine. But then the 50s came, and you had “Rebel without a cause”. Teens started thinking about riding motorcycles, greasing up their hair, and not asking for their parent’s permission (By God!). Then the 60s came and the Gap was […]
December 8, 2025
fter a night of jittery half-sleep at a hotel (and, like, who thought it was a good thing to hang neon lighting along the outer window frame of a hotel room? Is this the newer version of a flashing “HOTEL” sign?), I had a nice breakfast and headed over to the museum site near the Miami Zoo. Got there early and eventually they opened the gate for the site and I went in. The railroad museum here is impressive – there was once an airship hanger here. Now it’s an open train shed with all manner of equipment here, including […]