robert.admin – Page 165 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 26, 2013

OpsLog – DT&I – 10/26/2013

I‘ve known Terry Harrison for ten years and three layouts. He’s a sawed-off hot-head, an ill-tempered tosser who harangues his operators. He also designs some of the most realistic switching I’ve ever worked. I’ve worked setouts and pickups on layouts that were about as exciting as putting socks into a drawer. And then there are the layouts with owners who are so sadistically clever, they force their crews to work through complicated logic puzzles, as if the railroad is more a mensa club than a working transportation company. But Terry’s worked on actual railroads and knows what they do and […]

October 26, 2013

OpsLog – CD&P – 10/26/2013

To be or not TOFC, that is the question. The Chicago, Denver and Pacific is big. Bigger than big. Bigger than you can imagine. It’s frankly the largest home layout I’ve even seen. Remember what I said about the TC&C yesterday? This one’s bigger. I was running Train 41, a combo of coal (on at Denver) and limestone (to add at Sedalia). I was on the approach to the latter, walking allll the way down to the end of the long room, before walking down the other side, allllll the way back. I was unfamiliar with the layout so with […]

October 25, 2013

OpsLog – TC&C – 10/25/2013

The Tennessee Carolina & Coast is a wonderfully long and lazy railroad with a bittersweet background story, one I can’t really go into. But even given that, it’s an eye-popper when you enter its basement. The railroad aisle (between sightblocking backdrops) forces you into a corridor, layout shelves to either side, which you follow and follow and follow some more, lost in its convolutions. I am convinced this thing is a tesseract, folding over itself in real space. The runs were fun and very casual, the switching interesting yet not contrived. I really enjoyed it. Nice moment tonight – was […]

October 24, 2013

A word, an idea, a thought… (DOG EAR)

There are two ways to string multiple words to make your point. One is like this… The tornado blew the house apart, throwing boots, a bathtub, books and the sofa all across the fields. And the other is like this… A tornado is a wind, a gust, a breeze, a blow. See the difference? Read it again. Both string a halting series of words behind it, to force the reader though a series of quick-start descriptions (perhaps for reasons of pacing and evidence). However, in the first, we are denoting the wide variety of objects scattered, their unique differences, trying […]

October 23, 2013

OpsLog – LM&O – 10/23/2013

Matthew, our cub dispatcher, is certain I’m going to write about him tonight. I’ll bet you think this blog is about you – don’t you? don’t you? (Between you and me, dear Reader, we did have an across-the-division slowdown in trains and a couple of the later runs annulled. But seriously, the kid was running noticeably more in control. I am aware of no cornfields, and he seemed more careful in his warrants. About the same speed, but better than last time). I was on 244, a freight out of Cincinnati, heading towards Bound Brook. Paul was filling out as […]

October 21, 2013

OpsLog – Longwood and Sweetwater – 10/21/2013

So I’m sitting in my little yard goat, chugging up the passing siding with four cars in front. All I gotta do to finish this job oh-so-slick is to take the four cars and the engine out the other end, run down the length of my train, shove everything back together, and home-we-go. So I’m pushing into the tail track off the end of the passing track, pushing in, watching the space between the front car’s coupler and that bumper drain away. And now it’s close, close, and the brakeman in the front swings his hands out – cut! No […]

October 20, 2013

The Mammoth Book of Time Travel SF (Review)

The mark of a really good science fiction collect isn’t that I read it and enjoy it. It’s that my wife reads a number of its stories. Without a gun to her head. Not that I have a gun. Still. Mike Ashley (with whom I’ve had a long review relationship over his Verne and Invasion novels) (I chuckled to myself when I saw it was my old friend again) assembles a goodly number of time travel yarns, dozens of short stories. And what pleasantly surprised me in this collection was the fact that they were all (with the exception of […]

October 17, 2013

Facing the Obvious (DOG EAR)

I‘m reading Pillars of the Earth and, while it’s a good book, the writer is playing a cheap trick on me. His villains are ugly. His heroes are handsome (or at least not blemished). That’s a basic trick. I mentioned seeing it in Trapped, but that’s not the only place I’ve seen it lately. It’s a lazy way win points for your hero with the audience, and make your villains more villainous. Really, come on – you have 400 pages, all sorts of room for development. Why rush to establish characters? There are countless examples where this isn’t true – […]

October 13, 2013

The Diary of a Young Girl (Review)

For those who don’t know the story of Anne Frank, a young Jewish girl trapped in Amsterdam during the Nazi occupation, it’s a grim testimate to what people will do to cling to life. When Anne’s sister is summoned for deportation to a labor camp, her father envoked plans he’d been slowly assembling. He and others in his workplace had reconfigured the top floor (and attic) of his office building to a refuge, its entry masked by a fake bookshelf. Into this urban lifeboat go Anne, her sister, her parents, as well as a aquantaince of her fathers (and his […]

October 13, 2013

OpsLog – TY&E – 10/13/2013

The first real session on the Tipton, Youngstown & Erie. I’d prototyped a timetable for JW to use – all he had to do was move the times a bit and add a couple of cornfields and he had it. But in this, one of my favorite runs in the design was a LEM to Sandmine, picking up sand and log cars, then a turn and a long run to Staffordtown. Exchange the cars on those sidings, then back to respot for the next day. When the jobs […]