robert.admin – Page 181 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 3, 2014

ShowLog – Orlando Fairgrounds – 8/3/2014

‘ll admit that a two day weekend show is tough. We need to run for six hours a day and then pack and go. And that’s six hours of running with kids, of asking people not to touch (or, ferchristsakes, lean on) the layout. But today, while long, was easy. Had a sizable crew show up on time. Steve brought donuts*. Everyone there grabbed a rag and some alcohol and cleaned their way around the layout. Fifteen minutes until open, trains started coming out from Bowden Yard and the NS North Jax. When people came in, we were running. And […]

July 31, 2014

Power to the People (DOG EAR)

t’s a long weekend at the beach. I’m working on my blogs (just finished Lola!) and the wife is reading her kindle. Then she frowns. “I’m running out of power.” A deeper frown. “I didn’t bring my charger.” Welcome to another chapter of my continuing drama – What’s wrong with eReaders. Yeah, it’s marvelous technology. You can highlight things that catch your fancy. You can flip back and forth. You can even search through text (the great “So who the hell is this?” function). And for me, looting Project Gutenberg has been a dream. But there are problems. My reader […]

July 30, 2014

OpsLog – LM&O – 7/30/2014

ve run operations on this railroad for something like thirteen years, which comes out to about 130 sessions. Yeah, I know how things work. And that’s why, when I backed my favorite GP-7s onto the front of the Silver Bullet One, out of Bound Brook and running three hours late, I knew things were running hard outside. See, I was in staging, a hidden yard in the back of the railroad which is pretty much “backstage” to our little drama. A double-ended yard, it simulates both ends of the division. A train leaves one end, drives all the way across […]

July 27, 2014

What happened to Orlando (Review)

ne of the good things about having a local independent book market (called, surprisingly Bookmarket (get the pun?)) is that you will see all sorts of offerings that you won’t see at your local Barnes and Noble (and that you’d never find on your non-local Amazon)). Case in point: What Happened to Orlando. This is a collection of short stories by local young (teen) authors describing the end of Orlando. What a gas this is – not since Alas Babylon have I grooved in the destructions of local landmarks. As HG Wells said of War of the Worlds, in research, […]

July 20, 2014

Another Brick in the Moon (Review)

n this story, Adam Roberts does what I enjoy (when it’s done well) – he takes an older established story and polishes, reworks and updates it until it shines. And in this case, he focuses on The Brick Moon, reviewed HERE. So here, our narrator Charles Bann, so very alive in our own gritty modern-day world, is hardly cut from heroic cloth. Mentioned in passing (and by his own account) as something less than a ladies man, a blind date who dumps him tosses him a bone in the form of a contact who knows something about “The Transcript”. And […]

July 17, 2014

Beach Books (DOG EAR)

t’s the weekend of July 4th and we’re out at the beach. The wife and I are rounding off her three-mile daily walk (and, frankly, sweating our glands out through our pores). And while I’m trying to distract myself from the salty sting in my eyes, I’m noticing all the beach books cracked open. That’s cool. Everyone likes a beach book. It’s one of the icons of Me-ism, just sitting in a chair on the sands, enjoying a low-IQ kettle-boiler. In fact, many reviewers (myself included, I believe) have reviewed a fun books as a great “beach book”. Yeah, all […]

July 14, 2014

Lola! (DOG EAR)

ne my favorite movies is The Great Waldo Pepper. It’s a movie about World War One fliers trying to eke out a living barnstorming and movie flying in the twenties. In one scene near the end, Waldo is talking with Ernst Kessler, a one-time top German ace and now a boozy three-time potbelly loser. But there is still something magical about him. He speaks of flying and the paramount moment of his life, when he fought (and downed) four American fliers. There is a line that sticks with me. “I keep track of talent.” That’s an interesting statement, short and […]

July 13, 2014

The Brick Moon (Review)

o you gotta understand that The Brick Moon is scifi from way, way, waaaaaaaay back. We’re talking initial publication in 1869. Think about that. Telegraphs and steam engines and horses and six-guns. The transcon had just been completed (the Union Pacific crashing in bankruptcy) and the scars were still tender from the Civil War. The Brick Moon starts with a lesson in navigation, how you can tell latitude easily by the elevation of the polar star, but longitude (east-west position) requires clocks and guesswork. But say you could build a tower on the Greenwich Mean Line, one a hundred miles […]

July 13, 2014

ShowLog – Deland – 7/12/2014

f you want to see a BUSY mainline, look no further than the Orlando N-trak sectional layout. We’ve got a train by on our double-track mainline every 30-40 seconds or so. Which is why, when your equipment takes a dump, it’s such a mega-pratfall. Was running north through the bottom of the “U” (what is geographically just north of Jacksonville bay, just beyond I-95). I was pulling 40 mixed freight cars behind two dinky Geeps. Now, these four-axle jobs have a unique deal – if you load them up, they don’t just wheel-spin, they conk out. Reasons abound for why […]

July 10, 2014

Decorum (DOG EAR)

riting about real people (living people (living people who can get pissed at you and give you a sock on the nose)) is always tricky. Unless you are writing a political rag with a fiery agenda, you’ve got to have a care towards those you write about. I reflected on this today while driving home, considering how I’d blog up the TY&E railroad session I’d just run on. You see, besides writing about writing, I write about model train operations. Every session I attend, I blog. Some of the blogs are closely followed by their owners. So, the question is, […]