robert.admin – Page 28 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

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 […]

February 29, 2024

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/28/2024

ake a moment to put it into perspective. The famous La Mesa club at San Diego has op sessions on their two-story (not two level, two story) HO railroad. It’s 25 scale mile s long, runs 16 scheduled trains and maybe the same number of extras (so about 30 trains total). They host this with 30 to 40 engineers. They manage a 25 hour session 4 times a year. Orlando N-Trak runs its sizable N-scale layout with 15 miles of mainline, runs 25 scheduled trains and a possible couple of extras. We run with 25 people, hosting a 2.5 hour […]

February 26, 2024

OpsLog – TBL – 2/25/2024

uscarora has been inoperative for two months now. The interlocking started fritzing; I got the last good interlocking session on 12/30/2023 (Happy New Year!) and then a massive failure in a status run (1/21, aborted). So my electrical engineer reworked the cheater box so that I could run only turnouts, no interlocking effort. And that’s a pity, because that’s where the pike shines. Still, a basic session is better than no session and so my friend Greg came over for the day and we ran the way we did years back; a coal guy, a local guy and a lot […]