robert.admin – Page 3 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

March 22, 2026

OpsLog – LM&O (Saturday Night Special) – 3/21/2026

kay, we have all the pre-warrants out. Clocks are set. Have a conductor assigned to the newbie. The guest who was wandering around has left (does anyone read the door sign – private event, Jack). Radio established with BETH Tower and confrimed with the room. Every train that needs to move has been signed up for. Prebrief was nice and quick. Ready to go. And the clock strikes… 00:A6? What? Fuddled with it while confirming 223 entering the interlocking district and 231 was out the door. Tried to change it but couldn’t get a “real” time on it. Turned it […]

March 17, 2026

MeetLog – Vero Beach – 3/16/2026

he Eastern Model Railroad Meet (ironic since, recently, the eastern division of the sunshine region of the NMRA was recently abolished) was held today, way way down in Vero Beach today. Since two N-Trakers were asked to come down and speak (me, on TT&TO, and Reverend Jim, because I badgered him into speaking last minute on T-Trak because “Weren’t you a public speaker?” works really well. We also had Joel Morse (“Layout planning for operations”) and Host Chip Pecere (“Designing your layout before construction”). Interesting, two other people cancelled out of the one Jim covered (“Introduction to T-Trak Modelling”) (Including no-show […]

March 15, 2026

OpsLog – WVN – 3/14/2026

tanding on the ballast in Huntington Yard, night falling heavily over the property, a massive steam engine hissing behind me. Trainmaster Gail Komar (or “Tuffnut”, as the crews call her) is telling me that this reefer block needs to go up the hill quick since it’s thawing out in the here and now. True, I can hear the brine drip-drip-dripping on the ties as the block ice shrinks. She gives me that bombardier stare of hers. “Your the man for the job. The only man. Everyone else is off shift.” “It’s covered, Ma’am.” So it had been a long day […]

March 15, 2026

We’ll Prescribe You a Cat (Review)

he Japanese love cat stories, specially ones that deal with cats interacting and improving their owners. And this book is nothing short of that. Kyoto (as I remember from my trip there) is a town arranged in a neat grid, everything lined up nicely. Further, there is the old geisha quarter just across the river, still active. So, interesting place. What I didn’t know is that is an alley that can only be located if you really need to locate it, one that leads to a run-down building. At the top of five flights of stairs, a large door. Go […]

March 8, 2026

OpsLog – Tusk Valley – 3/7/2026

club buddy of mine, Pete, mentioned he’d be out at the clubhouse on Saturday, just a casual hang-out deal. Figured I’d run Tuscarora solo – he just wanted to putter about the main line on the club layout. Fine – I’ve run solo before. But then a new member of the club – young Zach, named so as not to be confused with President Zach – asked if he could try it. He’s just starting out, has a small place, and wants to see how micro ops work. Sure, why not. Of course, I always invite guests to run their […]

March 8, 2026

When the Moon Hits your Eye (Review)

ong time John Scalzi fan, from Old Man’s War to Redshirts to Starter Villain. So when my best friend (and fellow Scalzi fan) told me about this book, I had to immediately say… “What?” Okay, so stay with me. One day, for reasons not given or even hinted, the moon changes… to cheese. It is first noticed in various museums and lunar rock storage areas, where now all they have are lumps of cheese. But it is quickly noticed in the sky – so as not to throw off the tides and wreck havoc, the moon is much bigger (since the mass of cheese […]

March 5, 2026

LilySmash (Dog Ear)

ll I can say is that my anime shirts introduce me to a lot of young people. I got me talking to the baristas at Framework (Mattie, Mars, and the rest). And it introduced us to Lily. She’s a young artist (everyone looks young to me, but not every artist looks like an artist). She works in an undisclosed restaurant that the wife and I go to after the Zen sit. She’s a perky little thing and makes me feel old just talking to her, but she’s trying to find a way out of food services and into art. She’s tried […]

March 1, 2026

OpsLog – OSMR – 2/28/2026

e picked up an invite from our sister (half-sister, given it’s “half-O”) clubs, the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders, for an ops session. They still want to learn from us (which is odd, given the hash we made of our last session). But no, an open invite, and I was pleased at our turnout – we were (just looking) half the crews. We had myself, Kyle, Phil, Terry (in club grays, looking so team-spirited), Mike (in club-heritage black) and Pete (in some sort of black shirt I think he got off a dead ninja (I’m assuming that Friday night at […]

March 1, 2026

The Warrior (Review)

he Warrior is a David Drake novel, following along in the tank tracks (not correct, since they are hovertanks) of the feared and respected Hammers Slammers, a mercenary tank battalion in the far future. I’ve mentioned a couple of novels from this series, including the titular Hammers Slammers. The thing is, the author is a combat veteran and it shows in the novels. People don’t question, don’t ponder life’s strange events, they simply act. And the tanks they act in are the largest and most dangerous machines in the galaxy. As witness in the three short stories that make up the central […]

February 26, 2026

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/25/2026

ears ago, my father passed away at 4am at a local hospital. By 9am that morning, I was writing his obituary. “You’re the writer,” my family told me. Yes, so it’s a bit like that. It was a very stormy night on the railroad last night. Tempers high, expectations low, waits long, and on improperly aligned turnouts – shorts. There are a number of issues we had – most of them you know, some of them I don’t know, but yeah, let’s debrief it from my point of view. The dispatcher had a number of issues. First off: the east […]