robert.admin – Page 4 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

January 12, 2026

OpsLog – P&WV – 1/8/2026

o this is evening session of Zeus and my two-for-Thursday operations marathon. After finishing up wrecking the Virginia Southwestern, we raced up I-4 to get to Tom Wilson and our session on his Pittsburgh & West Virginia. This is a coal-hauling, steel-making layout with a heavily-traveled main line and long branch up to Mifflin and Clariton, all serving a gigantic mill complex. We were the first to arrive – found host Tom trying to string intercom cables like a sapper under artillery fire. When we couldn’t get it to work, I told him to just seat me at a tiny […]

January 12, 2026

OpsLog – VSW – 1/8/2026

convention was held in Cocoa this weekend – Protorails. While I couldn’t attend (I had a train show to manage in Deland over the weekend) I picked up a dispatcher request for two railroads hosting sessions for the con, both on the same day. So the first was the Virginia Southwestern, John Wilke’s fabulous coal hauler. And since it’s a dual line with shared trackage, I was able to weasel a second free pass for Zeus H, a young dispatcher I’ve sessioned with in the past. The only problem here was that he got stuck in the Amsterdam snow disaster […]

January 4, 2026

Wizenbeak (Review)

hen the novel Wizenbeak came out, you’d probably walk into any mall, look through the one or two bookstores housed there, go to the fantasy section which was greater than the current Barnes and Noble, pick through the many selections and buy it (likely with cash). That’s a period piece of when this book was released (1986, currently forty years ago). Well, most books either come from Massive Amazon, pathetic B&N, or, in this case, a used bookstore. But enough of that. The titular character of this book is a wizard, complete with a troll-bat, who wishes to use his own water […]

January 1, 2026

OpsLog – TBL – 12/31/2025

es, so this is it, my last session for 2025 (unless someone calls in the next few minutes and I’m grabbing my throttle bag and running for the car). Anyway, I thought about going over to the clubhouse and running a quick session by myself. But I opened the invitation up – looks like everyone else was busy and I got one guy – Shemp. But that’s fine. This is the thing. This year, I ran in room-packer club sessions with 30+ people all working in tight harmony to get through the simulated day. I ran on structured layouts that […]

January 1, 2026

The Best of 2025 (DOG EAR)

ime again for my review of books I really enjoyed for 2025. Of course, these aren’t all published this year – there is no statue of limitations on books you might discover. For example, The War of the Wenuses was a random discovered off a YouTube video which was published some century and a quarter ago. It was a lampoon of War of the Worlds and really made me laugh. However, most of you (not being addicts of the original) would not understand the lampooning that takes place in it – since it was right on the edge of getting the nomination, I […]

December 22, 2025

OpsLog – WAZU – 12/21/2025

his fine day started in the crew beanery where we were served Louisiana dishes (I think it was gumbo and something else that looked like gumbo, a roadkill mix of good eatin’. Why we were eating southern in preparation for an Oregon run, I’ve no idea. But it’s good eating, far better than anyone (save Rob Gross) serves up (the Tuscarora? Two packages of sugar-free cookies). For all my snark, I did snark down too much, feeling bloated all session. Should have brought that up in the debrief. So Zach was dispatcher and I was running road. I did have […]

December 21, 2025

OpsLog – FEC – 12/21/2025

t’s getting into the holidays, people are traveling, holding parties and such, so scraping up a session is getting difficult. As it was, the December 20th running of the Farnham’s Florida East Coast was a close-run thing. He got just enough people to run a casual session together – no dispatcher, sorta TT&TO style. The day was nice, we opened the doors and went to work. My first run was 930, the busy Titusville out-n-back. I really had a good time with this one – it was very overloaded (the Nehi bottling plant had a occupied dock and four cars […]

December 21, 2025

The Demon-Haunted World (Review)

ince I haunt flat-earther and young creation groups on Facebook (debunking various silly opinions on occasion) I thought I’d enjoy Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, And why not? Sagan wrote this in the mid-nineties and is a noted science advocate, using his background to guide and instruct those are less-inclined to it. Yes, that’s what I wanted to do. My problem is that the book just didn’t agree with me. Perhaps it was the small print or the long routes he too on some of his points, perhaps readers and writers sometimes don’t click. Don’t know. But my rate of […]

December 18, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O – 12/17/2025

ears back in the 60s, there was a term on everyone’s lips (there were no feeds then) – “Generation Gap”. As it was, until the 50s, kids and teenagers were seen as simply “young adults”. They wore the same clothing, cut their hair the same, and the only men (and no women) with tattoos were in in the Merchant Marine. But then the 50s came, and you had “Rebel without a cause”. Teens started thinking about riding motorcycles, greasing up their hair, and not asking for their parent’s permission (By God!). Then the 60s came and the Gap was […]

December 18, 2025

Shadow media (DOG EAR)

veryone knows (should know) Plato’s allegory of The Cave. People are in a cave, never having been outside it. They are chained so they can only see the far wall. Behind them, other people with torches make shadows and sounds, defining the limited reality of those so placed. Their only reality is what they experience directly. Their thinking is stunted. This came to me while reading Rafael Sabatini’s Scaramouche, the first few chapters. See, I’d bought an Audible copy of a friend who is rather well read but hasn’t tried this one. Also, his life is so hectic that he can […]