robert.admin – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

September 13, 2026

OpsLog – LM&O – 9/12/2026

irst thing – Did I get the date right this time? That established, okay, so usually after a session like that, I do an OpsLog like this, meaning massive praise at how wonderful we all were. Well, true enough. But reflecting on this, I’ve run on layouts tiny, on bedroom layouts so casual that (in one case) the owner offered us beer and pornography in his crew lounge), to layouts so realistic that you pucker, worried that you are going to goof and have all the pros sneering at you. But if I had to pigeon-hole us, one word, I’d say we’re Inclusive. […]

September 11, 2026

OpsLog – P&WRR – 9/10/2026

ot an invite through a friend to come down to Sebastian, Florida for a session. The soup ticket was to Don Irace’s Providence & Worchester Railroad, which I knew nothing about. Bungled the entire trip over, overestimating travel times which put me sitting in the world’s nastiest donut shop for just over an hour, waiting for hot-time. Anyway, once Chip showed up and showed me where the railroad was, I met Don (who is a very nice guy, and who is the host of the segment Talking Ops with Don Irace on the Around the Layout podcast). The layout is packed (thoughtfully) […]

September 6, 2026

OpsLog – TBL – 9/5/2026

ell, second weekend in a row for the Tuscarora Branch Line. This time, I took my own advice from last week and brought in cookies and offered free sodas to the crews to keep them all jingly on sugar. And it seemed to work. Not only did we run a full session this time, we did it in three hours! So, we were short one guy (I think he was training on Dagobah). Still, we had Shemp on the scheduled freights, Zach2 on the coal patrol, and Zeus doing his keyboard odyssey up in the tower. Me, I was station […]

September 6, 2026

In the Courts of the Crimson Kings (Review)

o a very interesting novel by S.M. Stirling, and part of a series (I think, possibly The Sky Kings). This novel, In the Courts of the Crimson Kings, we seem to be in the middle of things. This novel assumes (as its plot twist) that we’ve long observed life on Venus and Mars. In fact, it opens at a science fiction convention (with cameo by famous authors) in 1962. It’s known that Russian probes to Venus has found scifi staples of dinosaurs, cave men and (of course) beautiful cave gals. And on Mars, we’ve observed cities and canals on this arid, […]

August 31, 2026

OpsLog – TBL – 8/29/2026

ust a Saturday at the club, running with some friends (Jack, Kyle, Mike and Terry). We had just enough people for a full session, so I took the desk, Kyle the levers, Jack the local, Terry a lump of coal and Mike was my Tusk SO. I gotta say that everyone really pitched in – while we didn’t get all the way through (Jack, due to his drive, had requested a hard 4pm stop). But we ran up to the Easton Turn and probably stopped about 30 real minutes short of completion. But I’ll note this – I forgot to […]

August 27, 2026

OpsLog – LM&O – 8/26/2026

hings went to shit at dinner. That’s when the rain started. I knew things were bad when emergency vehicles, a cruise liner and an ark went past on Colonial Drive. At the club, people were literally dribbling in. I didn’t think we’d be able to staff the session. Some people reported doubled travel times. But enough people showed up and with some early job-shifting, we were able to cover early local jobs. Other’s sloshed in a little later and took the evening tick jobs. I was dispatching with Zach again. The first time we’d put the gold team on the […]

August 16, 2026

Jumper (Review)

read this when it hit the shelves in the early nineties and remembered loving it. Even gave my copy to my sister-in-law to read (and, evidently, misplaced in Horder’s Hell). Alas. So, Jumper is about a young boy whose father is extremely abusive. Having chased off his mother (more like her fleeing for her life), his father turns his rage on the boy, often beating him with a belt with a rodeo buckle on it. And one night, because he’s drunk, hates himself, hates his life, for whatever reason, he turns his rage (and belt) on his son again. David […]

August 14, 2026

OpsLog – YVRR – 8/13/2026

‘ve imagined walking down modeled South Morgan Street, waving to drunk George in the guard shack, to Betty who is having her smoke at the tower door. I pass the cross bucks standing over the grade crossing, past Jacob’s on the right (the smell of fuel hanging heavy in the Appalachian air) and the boarded-up passenger depot on the left. Another hundred yards down this road will bring me to the main drag of Tuscarora, quaint in its 1962 time frame, not a corporate logo to be seen. Yeah, this is the place I imagined and modeled. So Jack’s reworked […]

August 9, 2026

OpsLog – TBL (Black Diamonds) – 8/8/2026

very adventure needs tension. Not an evil opponent, simply tension. You know, man vs. nature, man vs. self, man vs. Model Railroading. My tension was Turnout 1, just below the Westly Mine, which was sticking. Noticed it at the end of the last session. At first, it wasn’t quite normalizing. Then, after tossing it back and forth manually a few times, it wasn’t resetting in either direction. My stomach knotted. I decided to just finish the session and then deal with it on the following Saturday, when there would be time and tools for the job. When I tried to […]

August 9, 2026

The Last Watch (Review)

new series by (I guess) our new author J.S. Dewes, a tale of betrayal and terror on the literal edge of the universe. So rich boy Cavalon, a privileged brat who annoyed his all-powerful granddad in a very rebellions manner, gets “French Foreign Legioned” to the Argus, a decommissioned battleship now serving as a gutted watchpost, eyes on the “frontier”, supposedly watching for the return of an alien horror that all but annihilated us in two wars. Of course, he’s a rich boy in a ship full of angry troops who have all been sent to this outpost in the literal […]