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August 23, 2023

Game Story (DOG EAR)

here is a term in gaming, “One more turn”. It’s pretty much for turn based games where you are managing or building something with the revenues and technologies you are gaining. Every turn, you almost have the next thing you need. Reminds me of the night I started a game of Railroad Typcoon. After a while in my game, my wife passed by and told me she was going to bed. “Sure, hon. Just another turn or two”. But then those new heavy steam engines came out – perfect for those heavy coal hauls. And then another tycoon employed a […]
August 21, 2023

OpsLog – WAZU – 8/20/2023

kay, so I’m told if you can’t say anything good about someone’s dispatching, don’t say anything. … … <crickets> … … … … Is that long enough? What’s the statute of limitations on this? I will mention that my first train into Umatila (ordered to the siding, and precious to me, given the long wait to get that warrant) had me on approach to find a bank of headlights from two facing trains (it looked like an alien mothership, so bright) shining at me in the early morning hours. Only that checkbox 4 (watch for trains (plural) ahead) kept me […]
August 20, 2023

RIPLog – TBL – 8/19/2023

t’s getting so the “Old Sweats” in the club are outnumbered. At one point, we were the club and when one of us passed on, there would be a full mob at the service. Now we are increasingly irrelevant. With Don Ziesig’s passage, only four of his oldest friends were there. Anyway, so Don did pass and the club received an invite to the service. We were also asked if we could bring a model train thing since it was such a part of Don’s life. We could have brought a sectional layout piece but (a) we couldn’t fit it […]
August 16, 2023

OpsLog – WVN – 8/12/2023

t was a great day on the WVN – a group of three N-Trakers (myself, Kyle and Zack) rode over to Tampa and the wife tagged along (she usually won’t run trains except at the FEC but she has run once before at the West Virginia Northern and the scenery and realistic engine control just makes that railroad the cat’s pajamas so she’ll play). And that we had two other engineers filling out the roster whom I’ve run with before (and know they are good), we had all the makings of a great session. And so that’s what we did. […]
August 13, 2023

Norse Mythology (Review)

he missus and I have been watching a NetFlix series, Ragnarok – It’s a series about a high school kid in Norway who has come to realize that he is a reborn Thor, that there are ice giants living in his town, and that Ragnarok, the final battle between gods and giants, is coming. Great little series which I highly recommend. Which is why, when nosing around my local bookstore, I found Norse Mythology, which might sound stuffy until you realize that writer and humorist Neil Gaiman wrote it. Thought about it – for about a second – and picked […]
August 11, 2023

On Sheet – Club Duties

very kid (and the kids in us) dream of advancing a throttle and running a mile-long train out of a yard, leaning out of that cab window and calling the signals, checking the flimsies and feeling the wind howl around our weather-beaten head. Nobody dreams of working the hostler job, keeping the boiler pressures up over the long cold night. Or clerking, typing waybills and train orders up. Or walking the track, checking the line. Or walking through the cars punching tickets. There are things that support those god-like engineers that just isn’t fun. Same goes true for being in […]
August 11, 2023

A Friendly Challenge (DOG EAR)

nteresting thing happened to me today. I finally got signed up (I hope) for Medicare. It took four hours (and two help calls) to get this done. I was dragging by the time I finished. To celebrate, I grabbed the wife and our books and we headed over to our favorite Orlando coffee house, Framework. When we came in, there is one barista guy I always chat with for a bit. Today when we came in, he said, “It’s my favorite customers”. When I tried to downplay it, he responded that I always have something interesting to chat about, and […]
August 6, 2023

The Golden Ocean (Review)

atrick O’Brian was a big deal back in the nineties with his Aubrey/Maturin books. Anyway, he was so hot that they scraped the bottom of the barrel for anything else he’d produced. It’s not to say that The Golden Ocean was bad – it was just forty years old at that point. And really, it’s pretty good. The novel follows a young Irish lad, Peter Palafox, who has gotten himself a berth on Commodore Anson’s flagship of his risky round-the-world, loot-everything-Spanish expedition (which I read about in The Wager, which reminded me I had these somewhere at stack-bottom). It’s a […]
July 29, 2023

On Sheet – When Things Go Wrong

any of you might remember that incident we had on Tusk Hill (a division of my Tuscarora layout, where we run an English Midlands session rather than a western Pennsylvania one). Here is the disaster report. So the designer/builder Steve (a good friend whose help has been critical in the development of my microlayout) came out to the club (where we keep it) and took a look at it. He checked the obvious possibilities (particularly the solder joints) and after two hours gave up. It would take a lot more work. So he loaded it into his car (yay, microlayouts) […]
July 27, 2023

Missed Communications (DOG EAR)

hen I was a young lad of twenty or so, I was in a long-distance (i.e. stupid) relationship. To talk to my west coast girl, I had to wait until 11pm Sunday night (8pm her time) to afford the crippling long distance changes. Turns out, in retrospect, I should have just flushed the money down the toilet. Oh well. But what bugs me is the world we live in now. People have phones that can instantly, cheaply connect you with anyone around the planet. Often in coffee shops, I’ll hear young people taking call after call, text after text, fully […]