robert.admin – Page 15 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 23, 2023

The Wager (Review)

o this is a first – my wife pushed an age-of-sail book on me for once. And it was very, very good. So the HMS Wager was one the ships in Commodore Anson’s floating boat-wreck of a mission, to round Cape Horn (at the tip of South America) and get into the Spanish Pacific, to loot, burn and steal (i.e. open piracy and murder with the hint of legitimacy that war brings). Easy plan – they’d round the world and be back by tea, right? Well, first, they are hounded by Spanish warships since even Irish children knew this mission […]

July 23, 2023

OpsLog – FEC – 7/22/2023

smell something burning.” I was working the out-n-back from Cocoa Yard to Frontenac, fussing over mismarked lading slips, trying to figure out what someone did and didn’t do a couple of weeks back in City Point (without a Rosetta Stone, either). And that’s when I smelled smoke. Engineer Chip was working the lower deck. When I asked him if his engine was on a switch, he told me no. But a car on his train was on a switch, one that had been set against him. And the truck of a wheel delicately placed with love between a rail and […]

July 21, 2023

On Sheet – Sound Check

ou know, DCC is a wonderful thing. Now we can drive trains and blink the lights and sound the whistle and bell. I’ve always wondered what those rheostat twisters in the ’50s would have thought of us now with all our digitalized magic. Just the options of not relying on electrical blocks allows us to run helpers and do all sorts of cool things. However, one thing that always bugs me is when, during operations, you see an engineer just driving along, toot-tooting his whistle in patterns only known to him, as cute yet pointless as Thomas the Tank Engine. […]

July 20, 2023

Time in ReTyrement (DOG EAR)

ne thing that the wags are quick to point out is how much spare time I have in retirement. Yes, after thirty years of programming and management, I’m apparently lounging on a Nile barge, eating grapes, looking out over vast horizons and sighing. Or something like that. Let’s see. Right after I retired, the world went to shit with Covid. During that time, I built a brand new layout (fundamentally different from everything). I also biked about 4000 miles. And I reffed a role playing game online, and hosted a Scurvy Dice game weekly. Then, as Covid went into the […]

July 16, 2023

Destroyermen 3: Maelstrom (Review)

he third book in The Destroyermen series did not disappoint. Whereas the first two books of the string only had the Americans (and one Japanese guy) in USS Walker, the Mahan, the Amagi (with the rest of the Japanese guys), the Lemurs and the nasty, toothy Grik, now we’ve added a couple of more power factions to this world. Since the Great Swarm didn’t work out so well for the Grik last book, they might as well try it again, this time fully backed by the big old Amagi, helmed by its frothing Japanese captain (who was perfectly fine with […]

July 16, 2023

OpsLog – Tusk Hill (Annulled) – 7/15/2023

know that Kyle put in a lot of work for the first “true” run of Tusk Hill – instructions, tokens, switchlists, everything. And I know that some people drove a very long way (Jim from St. Augustine and Ben from Celebration, and, taken for granted, Greg from Satellite beach). So we handed out paperwork, got the briefing and began. Jim was working both the coal job and the tally sheet and he seemed to be getting his head around how the Tusk works and how things are represented. Greg was standing by to take the shunter position. I ran up […]

July 14, 2023

On Sheet – Peeps

remember the moment my doctor told me I had cancer. I remember life being normal and then it was not. The next two days I don’t remember at all. And two weeks later, I had to dispatch our club layout. At the time I was the only dispatcher. I seem to recall the guys running flawless. It was a good session. The goofs were minor and we worked around them. But I suspect that if someone did something stupid (it has happened) or back-talked me on the phones (this, also), I’d have lost my total freaking shit. I don’t know […]

July 13, 2023

After words (DOG EAR)

‘m not going to be specific on this event, lest someone spots the post and knows exactly who I am talking about. Be that as it may, my wife and I attend a class every week. It can be pretty difficult but afterwards we reward ourselves and walk across the street to get a pizza. We need to move fast since we finish at 8pm and the joint closes at 9pm. Of course, the waiter knows us so we cut down a lot of ordering time. Thing is, for this class, we had a visiting “export” who always likes to […]

July 9, 2023

ShowLog – Deland – 7/8/2023

e’ll start with wrist-slapping. Over twenty people were supposed to be at setup today. We got a handful. Fortunately the crew we had was top-notch and we had just enough people to get the basic assembly team in action. Others drifted in after the layout was up, siting various reasons (the coo-coo fell off Kyle’s European clock, it seems). We were still nowhere near the numbers we’d been promised. And here is my admonishment – you are only as good as your word. Done. The rest of the train show clicked out as if it had been timetabled. Trains surged […]

July 7, 2023

On Sheet – Divergent Evolutions

didn’t know I was actually setting up an experiment on evolutions of thinking and divergent game science. I was just making a small switching layout. As has been covered here ad nauseam, I’m talking about my own Tuscarora, a layout that started as a 2×4 switching puzzle and has turned into a operations empire. Our last session (NOTED HERE) ran with seven operators over three hours. I’ve given NMRA clinics on the design stage I went through (not preplanned in any way) that I used to come up with operations on this micro layout. Basically, it was basic switching, the […]