robert.admin – Page 182 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

March 1, 2014

The new car

I‘m out of Orlando, driving over to Palm Bay for a fun model railroad ops session. Nobody else could go – the invite list is tight and my buddy has a cold and backed out. So it’s just me. And that’s fine. I’m finally getting a chance to get my new Mini Cooper out of the city, to let it loose on the wide open road. I’ve got the windows down, the sunroof open, and its a balmy 74 degrees. The sun’s just overhead, so sliding the shade forward screens me. The car’s flying along at 80+mph, sipping gas in […]

March 1, 2014

OpsLog – FEC – 3/1/2014

So at the start of the week, I was dispatching on a middle-sized coal hauler. By midweek, I was dispatching a huge railroad stretching across several states, as well as running their freight forwarding division. And now, on Sunday, I’m sitting in a going-to-rust, unwashed FEC engine in Miami Yard, tugging cars back and forth, a lowly classification hogger. How did this happen? The author side of me wishes it was because of a substance abuse problem, a fight over a woman, or perhaps because I caused a wreck that killed innocents and this was the only railroad job I […]

February 27, 2014

Serendipity (DOG EAR)

A little something happened while I was running a mile-long freight through the Carolina foothills, hogging on the Tennessee Carolina & Coast. I placed a magazine article. See, I was running trains up in the Asheville area (you can see my blog on trains, over on the left, for details of prototypical operations of trains). Guy named Steve was on the dispatcher’s panel, in the other room, directing the traffic by line phones. He’s got a magnetic board in front of him and he’s moving his markers to keep track of the trains (and telling the crews how far they […]

February 26, 2014

OpsLog – LM&O – 02/26/2014

It’s been a paperwork sort of week. On Tuesday at work, we held the wall in an ISO audit, with me with two big three-ring binders full of paperwork details. But more importantly, this month I also wrote a switch list generator for our club. The problem we faced was with our waybills and people walking off with pocketfuls of them. And every time they did, we had to make new waybills and generate entire runs of switchlists. A pain, it twas. So now I generated full lists for every train. The trick here was the order things happened. Cars […]

February 23, 2014

A fight with a cannon (review)

This short story dropped on me like a bombshell. I’m waiting for a mailed book to make it here, so to pass the time and flip some pages, I pulled up my old favorite site, Project Gutenberg (if you read and you STILL haven’t visited this place, what do I have to do, give you a boot in the ass?) and pulled down International Short Stories: French. While I’m unable to tell just when they were written, I’m thinking that they mostly come from the 1880s or so – there are trains and country scenes and horse drawn carriages, the […]

February 22, 2014

OpsLog – P&WV – 2/22/2014

I hate the idea of bucket lists. The thing is, if you are going to have an experience, it shouldn’t be an afternoon thing, something you do once without any expertise or knowledge or appreciation. It should be something you know and have studied and put an effort into. That said, I’ve dispatched dozens of railroads. I’ve run them with everything from mother-may-I to warrants to CTC. But I’ve never dispatched a railroad under timetable and train order (one of the most intensive and tricky ways to do it). And this is funny because I actually wrote code to dispatch […]

February 20, 2014

Pondering (DOG EAR)

It’s just a flatline day. I’m in the office before everyone else. Rode the bike in across misty fields, oddly quiet amid this city of a million souls. I’ve got an hour before my next meeting and thought I’d pop out a DOG EAR. But I’ve got nothing. This is one of those moments of existence that are so tough to capture, occur for everyone and yet hardly ever show up in stories. All across history, men have stood on the edge of fields or sat before their clerking desks, dangling in this moment of indecisive inactivity. It’s a moment […]

February 19, 2014

Disnificartion

I’m getting rid of my little yellow bug. I loved that car. Got it back in 2000, back when they were new and different. When we drove up through Georgia, people came out of the service station to gawk at it. I was the coolest uncle ever. On the road it handled well, and after all these years the controls feel as comfortable to me as the hilt of a samurai’s sword. My fingers know where everything is. No fumbling. Second nature. But over the recent years the relationship soured. There was the fact that even though that car spends […]

February 16, 2014

One of Clive’s Heroes (Review)

Another one off the freebee book site Project Gutenberg, another book-for-boys (that’s “YA” for you people in 2014) by Herbert Stang, whose The Adventures of Dick Trevalion I reviewed HERE. In this one, a bold yard of a plucky lad wins his fortune (and England an empire) by bashing the fuzzy-wuzzies in India in the 1750s. Yes, our boy this time is young Desmond Burke, a farmer lad, son of a famous English trader and now brother to a brutish older brother (a soddish farmer), who hero-worships Robert Clive, the local hometown boy who’s done well on the frontier. Things […]

February 13, 2014

Shared (DOG EAR)

Jesse is my best friend on Earth. We’ve a friendship that has gone back a bit over thirty years. And even though life has separated us, we still talk once a week, to argue politics, talk life or work out new games. So for Christmas/Hanukkah this year, I decided to pick up a book for him, my vastly-enjoyed The Fencing Master. This is a book recommended by a used book shop owner in London, the note of which I carried in my wallet for over a year. And when I read it… Wow. You know that sort of book. You […]