robert.admin – Page 49 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 17, 2023

On Sheet – Good as Gold

n our last post, we discussed (well, I presented and you read) about how important it was to be a good guest. You’ll remember it in Duties of the Guest. A cynical view might be – why? Why bother making someone else’s layout a success? Isn’t the point of this to just have fun, and if it’s going to be like a monastery on a rainy Saturday, why bother? Well, it comes down to this – do you like running trains? Do you like going to different layouts? If the answer is YES, then that’s the reason you go above […]

February 16, 2023

OpsLog – CSX Taft – 2/16/2023

ent over this morning for the second running of CSX – Taft, a neat little layout that explores potentials for fun without throwing away hundreds of square feet. And today, we ran with a number of new additions (Chris and I had talked this over and the fact that he took me seriously made me blink). Anyway, some new – neat things, first, a magnetic plate where you can keep track of your laps (when running mainline trains). And each lap is represented in a town roughly in that location (between Miami and Jacksonville). And second, random event cards! My […]

February 16, 2023

Avatar (DOG EAR)

alked into my local bookstore about thirty minutes before zen class. The place was about to close (for the public) and the owner had two young adults working the front (I think it is some sort of work-credit thing – I always see different young people working around the place). Now this part was weird – I’m not sure what their gender was. Both of them had crazy hair and lipstick and spoke in “valley-girl” lingo. But something said that they might, deep down, have XY chromosomes. If you think I’m bothered by this, I’m not. This is Colonialtown. Many […]

February 12, 2023

Alien Chronicles: The Golden One (Review)

as over at the local bookshop, getting ready for (of all things) a Zen class (long story). Of course, the danger of loitering in a bookstore is you end up buying books. I always nose the scifi section and found this three-book set, The Alien Chronicles. Now, my internal alarms went off – it’s produced by Lucasfilms back in 1998. Now, people who know me know I’ve soured on the whole StarWars thing. “Rebels been rebels, since I don’t know when,” as Don said. That whole franchised has been milked until its udders have fallen off. It’s a Disney thing […]

February 10, 2023

On Sheet – Duties of the guest

veryone always talks about how to set up an op session, and what you need to do as a host. But what about the duties of each and every operator? I wouldn’t have even considered these points if I hadn’t been at sessions where they occurred. Be on time: It is critical to be on time for a session. Jobs are being assigned and the host needs to know where he can put valuable operators. Worse, coming in late means that you are now a major disruption to the flow of the pike. If you are honestly running late because […]

February 9, 2023

Untold Stories (DOG EAR)

love finding the irony of events around me and composing a story around them. And I love good stories, where things happen and there is a humorous/moralistic/ironical meaning to them. I’m not keen on the “why I was great and everyone else is an idiot” stories – usually these involve straw men and simplistic one-upsmanship that serves no purpose outside of self-gratulation. However, every so often a story comes up that I’m reluctant to share. Often it will hurt the other person by telling it (even though, if it involves me or takes place around me, I’ll consider it public […]

February 6, 2023

OpsLog – NH – 2023/2/5

elp, they were predicting cold and rain, meteors and crust-cracking. But it turned out to be a beautiful day to run on the New Haven’s Highland Line. With the garage door open, we operated in pleasant outdoor conditions. Since it’s been a while, that worked in our favor since there was a rolling Q&A session on the driveway with host Rob Gross before the ball dropped (even your kindly reporter/dispatcher looked over a control panel that, at first, looked incomprehensible (add a few facing point locks and I’d just run screaming across the lawn)). But everyone got their paperwork, throttles, […]

February 5, 2023

The Courts of Chaos (Review)

nd here it is, the conclusion to the original Amber series, written in the 1970s, read by me in the early 1980s, carted about from place to place by me for forty years and eventually reread. The end! So, we have the world (bigger, reality itself) falling apart, an evil brother revealed and on the loose, and hero Corwin riding hard to reach the Courts of Chaos (basically, the Castle at the End of the Universe) to save things. Very exciting and very interesting. Of course, these days some readers might think of Corwin as “woke” (in that he attempts […]

February 5, 2023

OpsLog – WVN – 2/4/2023

think there is a trope forming, that for some reason everyone I attempt to carpool with suffers a medical episode. This time, got a call from the ER the night before, my co-ride bowing out. Come on, how dangerous are heart flutters in the grand scheme of things, you big baby! I mean, we’re talking operations on the West Virginia Northern! So, flying solo, I made my way out there. We were a bit short (with an additional cancellation), with Hostess Gail doubling up on yard jobs (“Thankee, no,” I thought). Instead, I got to run some really nice rolls, […]

February 3, 2023

On Sheet – It’s about time!

uestion: Why is there time and space? There is time so that everything doesn’t happen at once, and there is space so that everything doesn’t happen to you. When it comes to time, fast-time in model railroads get a bit of a bum rap. People think that the sole purpose of a fast clock is to generate all sorts of undue stress, like speeding up a production line to make the workers produce more. Poppycock. Time (and fast-time) is nothing more than a measure of where we are at in the operations sequence. If there is stress all around, that’s […]