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March 17, 2024

Armada (Review)

kay, a book by the guy who wrote Ready Player One, which was made into a movie that bore little resemblance to it. In this novel, we have another cast-off modern kid with absent daddy issues, Zach Lightman, who loves the late-sixties and seventies gaming world. Of course, while he is well-versed in older games, he is an Ace-of-the-Base in the modern game “Armada”. It’s a game that pits the main character (in a drone fighter) (which makes a lot more sense than wasting a perfectly good human) (kudos to author Ernest Cline for this point) against an enemy armada […]
March 15, 2024

On Sheet – Advice (Part 2)

n our last blog, I mentioned about getting advice from a kid in the middle of a brutal dispatching session. But sometimes advice can be useful. I was over at a great layout on the east coast of Florida. Nice line with CTC control and a lot of interesting switching. There is one job that runs down from the yard and works a very tight industrial area. One industry, a truss factory, sits across the main. Everything is is forward, and it’s all facing point, so it’s got that going for it. I’d just gotten down the hill when one […]
March 14, 2024

OpsLog – WVN – 3/9/2024

fter a good West Virginia Northern ops session with my friends Jeff and Kyle, we’re rolling home contentedly (from Tampa to Orlando by way of Atlanta, it seems). And while we’re all grinning like smug Buddhas, someone asks, “So, what are you going to blog about, Robert? Nothing really went wrong.” Well, there are moments. One of my favorites was when I was working Ashbury West End and Kyle was Hostler, lugging a massive steam Saturn V out of the roundhouse and onto the turntable, destined for an outbound train. The Keystone coal train had just come in, five hoppers […]
March 12, 2024

OpsLog – TBL – 3/11/2024

uick one tonight. Apparently Steve finally got a handle on the Tuscarora issue. He swapped out the chips under the tower and that seems to have fixed it. Big relief. To test this, I ran a full session by myself, going through the freight paces, working a basic session all the way through. The only thing that went wrong is that my BLI SW-7 (bought from Mike, weathered by Chris) suddenly lost throttle control. I’ve seen this before and just re-addressed. And now, for some reason, the rear headlight is always on. Kyle had hung around late and helped me […]
March 11, 2024

OpsLog – WAZU – 3/10/2024

guess operations can be like getting an old violin in tune. You turn the tuning peg one way and it sounds like a goose being choked (nothing out of you, JW). The other way, and it’s a fart in a wet suit. But if you get it juuuuuust right, the music is beautiful. That’s what happened on the WAZU today. For months we’ve been tinkering with this line, trying to get it to work right. See, the WAZU (simulating high speed rail traffic between Seattle and Portland) never quite hit that right note. The dispatching was too slow, the staging […]
March 10, 2024

Are We Rome (Review)

his was an interesting one, and the sub-title, The Fall of and Empire and the Fate of America makes it even more-so. And no, this is not a work of fiction. Here, author Cullen Murphy takes apart history (particularly of the Roman Empire through 400 AD and beyond. The obvious drive – Rome fell, and are we falling the same way? Well, it might not be the same, not really. After all, the Roman borders were indeed far away and news took forever to travel. Now, events that occur are available across the American Empire instantaneously, without control and sometimes […]
March 8, 2024

On Sheet – Advice (Part 1)

kay, I’m a firm sixty-five years old. Been in the hobby since I was five. Been in the club for thirty-five years and running ops on the layout (the original dispatcher) for twenty-five years. Yeah, I’m a fixture. We just picked up a new kid, looks like mid-twenties. He knows it all and makes comments about the other members openly (pretty ballsy, given that he’s been in the club for three weeks). But the real ass-chapper came last week during ops. Was at the panel (as I usually am). This railroad now runs on high volume – in this evening, […]
March 7, 2024

Future Nostalgia (DOG EAR)

ne of the popular methods of making distant future scifi relatable to us in the present day is to adorn the stories with items that relate to our world. The idea is that our present is carried into this future, to make us more curious. After all, there is our time carried forward for our amusement. Some examples. The Rocinante – This is the space ship in the wonderful Expanse series. It is the name of Don Quixote’s broken-down mount, and sorta hints that the heroes of that series consider themselves misguided in their various quests. Also, in one part, […]
March 3, 2024

OpsLog – C&A – 2/27/2024

rouped all my errands down the east coast of Florida into a big pile so I could work them all in one day. And one of these was a visit to Mark Svendsen’s Chicago & Alton Railroad. This one was a tidy little HO layout in a small room over a garage, perfect for two-man operations (well, with John Ligda and myself there, it was three-men, ourselves and host John pulling his hair out at our operational inefficiencies (yeah, I like using those bells and whistles). In truth, this line shows that you can squeeze all sorts of layout operations […]
March 3, 2024

Extra South (Review)

ne of the things that stuck with me in the movie The Flim Flam man (set in the “old South” at the end of the fifties) was the railroads. You saw L&N, Southern, and even Monon trains doing their small-town switching in their rural ways. I was reminded of it in Extra South, a wonderful book by author H. Reid. Here he focuses (in anecdote and pictures) of what the mid-to-late century was like on the sleepy lines of the South. From sugar cane railroads to tiny branch lines, even the railroad that went to Virginia Tech (my Alma mater, served […]