robert.admin – Page 10 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 16, 2025

OpsLog – Tusk Coast – 2/14/2025

t was a quiet night at the club, one of our Friday Night “Just Run Trains” events. I usually go to them to be the troubleshooter/babysitter (you gotta have a senior member present, if only to unlock the gates and door, and to plunger the toilet, right?). Since Zeus was up from Miami and not much was going on, we tugged Tuscarora out, quickly set it up and ran a fast session, just tower and local. Zeus took first shift running while I did leverman. There wasn’t much to say about it, which (like an airplane flight) is really how […]

February 16, 2025

Fatherland (Review)

o it’s Berlin, 1964. Not our Berlin, but a Berlin where Germany won World War Two. It’s not one of those “Germans Rule the Planet” deals – in this case, they own most of the east (but are still fighting red terrorists along a Vietnam-like front). All other European countries bow to them. And Hitler, now an old man, is about to have a massive birthday party. President Kennedy will soon be flying in to talk detente. Way below all this is a policeman, Xavier March, divorced, hated by his young son (for party reasons), an ex-uboat man, just doing […]

February 9, 2025

ShowLog – Jacksonville – 2/8/2025

hen I was in college, there was a board game about a Soviet sea invasion called Jacksonville: The beaches of DOOM. I never played it but I think I lived it on Friday. So the rubber hit the road – and blew. Three separate road incidents. Our trailer was low on Thursday when Jeff picked it up. Even through he refilled it, it was dead flat Friday morning, making him and his wife run over to a tire shop to get it replaced. Meanwhile, Greg hit something on 95 resulting in a catastrophic failure (tire, tube and rim) delaying him […]

February 9, 2025

Panzer (Review)

o we all have our images of Germany’s original push, the blitzkrieg, with well-run German tanks superior in technology and tactics to every nation they faced. Right? Well, as Matthew Cooper and James Lucas lay out in this 1976 book, no, not quite. The two authors make a pretty good case, showing how the successful (yet too little, too late) infiltration tactics of World War One led to the ideal of total mechanized warfare. You punch through a weak point. You drive hard, cutting communications and command, and rout the enemy. It’s how cavalry used to be used. And the […]

February 5, 2025

OpsLog – YVRR – 2/4/2025

he last time (a week or so ago) I was supposed to run on Jack Ferguson’s nifty little Yosemite Valley Railroad, I was at the dealership and found out that my car was a road-surface Hindenburg (fuel was leaking from a defective pump). So we called that one off. This was our reschedule. Now, Jack’s railroad is a nifty little runner, unitracked and smooth running. It’s got a full loop and ops are essentially a train coming onto the line (like my MT-1) and eventually leaving (like my EM-2 (the PeeDee)). There is some yard work, a pair of locals, […]

February 2, 2025

The Forever War (Review)

‘d read this so many years ago (pretty much when it came out) that I finally remembered it about half-way through this pass. The “soap bubble” air defenses – I remembered that. The Forever War was written by Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam vet, just after that pointless war ended. And it has a lot of the national angst that rocked us when it finally did shut down. Other than recent politics (and like the War in Forever, is comprised of half-truths and misconceptions), never had the nation been so divided. Haldeman captures that (hell, he was living it) in this […]

February 2, 2025

OpsLog – TBL – 2/1/2025

ecided on this nice open weekend to head over to the club for a quiet solo run of the Tuscarora Branch Line. The wife came along to read in the back (that’s what she said, anyway) and Pete came out, and later, Mike. So that became a bit distracting. We were either talking or putting run-through, time-jump units on the line. I was trying to run the tower and the scheduled jobs (and didn’t do very well with either). JB and Pete took a mess of pictures. So yes, some blunders on my part. The worst goof was setting out […]

January 26, 2025

Not Taco Bell Material (Review)

don’t know who Adam Carolla is. A friend said he runs a very popular podcast and was a personality as one of those sorts of “zoo crew” guys on various radio shows. He’s quite successful. Found his book on the shelf of a Norfolk used bookstore (where I get lots of books). Anyway, I looked it over and through “why not?” Okay, I did. I didn’t enjoy it very much. I’m sure that Mr. Corolla wouldn’t like me very much either. We are different sorts of people. So Not Taco Bell Material is a memoir of Carolla’s childhood, pretty a […]

January 26, 2025

Butterfly (DOG EAR)

o this brother-sister pair we know used to hang around with us a lot. They worked in my corporation and they always liked the experience of food. But not, it seemed, the experience of friendship. We’d agree to eat in some new, trendy place and agree on a time. Knowing that these places had just opened and other foodies were flocking there, the wife and I would get there about thirty minutes early, doing the line-standing and wedging into a table. And then we’d wait. And wait. Inevitably they would be late. Thirty minutes Sixty minutes. Oh, we’d get a […]

January 23, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O – 1/22/2025

o I was lucky to make it at all to the session tonight. After attending to “family issues” (the same way the Titanic’s sinking was noted as “shipping concerns”) I got there windblown and frozen with a half-hour to spare. I’d signed up for ore loads east and ore loads east it was going to be. On the dispatcher desks were Phil and Pete, Phil for a return visit to bedlam and Pete as a newbie DS. Okay, since I didn’t have time to think this out, giving Phil a five minute clinic on how my dispatcher panel works was […]