robert.admin – Page 5 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

January 30, 2026

OpsLog – LM&O – 1/28/2026

funny thing happened on the way to the slag pit. I found a long string of cars at the coke byproducts cutoff, fouling the spur. By the time I pulled that cut out of the way and hustled my pots to the pit and dumped them, they rolled down the hill like a couple of half-wrecking balls, bouncing through the midnight darkness. Cooled hard. So I’ll probably hear about that. That’s the sort of night it was. It started with me trying to run 927 (the Zanesville turn) trying to run against heavy eastbound traffic under a newbie dispatcher. I […]

January 30, 2026

Overdone CGI

t used to be that you needed a very bad actor to get the scenery-crewing over-emotions that old vaudevillians used to throw their emotions into the back rows. But now, with AI-creations trailblazed by firms such as Pixar, you can have it easy and cheap, even if you are sitting right in front of a mega-screen and don’t need this ham-fisted CGI playacting. I’m talking about modern Western animation, though I’ve seen it in foreign productions like Kpop Demon Hunters. In this case I was trapped in a car dealership waiting on slow repairs (do the mechanics share one set […]

January 25, 2026

OpsLog – LM&O – 1/24/2026

ead Actor (glancing through the curtain at a packed hall): “This will be the greatest production of Romeo & Juliet the stage has ever seen!” House manager: “Your lead actress called in sick and there is no understudy.” Lead Actor: “Gack!” So this Saturday Night Special, we had a lot of pre-signups. I was in the back getting the clock, my computer, and my trainee ready, going over everything while writing the pre-warrants. See, there is a trick to the opening moves on the LM&O. Basically, there is a freight and passenger train coming out of Cincinnati (possibly followed by coal […]

January 25, 2026

The Last Enemy (Review)

he Last Enemy is the third book in The Enemy Papers trilogy. You’ll remember that I reviewed the first two, Enemy Mine and The Tomorrow Testament down those links. The entire body of work forms the Human-Drak war. And by the end of the second book, we learn that another alien race (smaller and sneakier) set us up on a collision course for the major powerhouses on the planet Amadeen. There, like the West Bank and Northern Ireland, the war has become splinted and hateful, with groups fighting in the memories of old atrocities. It is so hopeless that thirty years ago […]

January 18, 2026

OpsLog – OSMR – 1/17/2026

ears back, I used to ride by bike over to Dick Sturm’s house to either work on his layout or run ops. It wasn’t a long ride, about two miles if that, but it was nice to ride home on cold winter nights after playing with trains. Anyway, wiggled an invite with the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders for a Saturday session and decided to ride over – this time the ride was seven and change, with the worst part on their end (a quarter mile on Aloma sidewalks, with all sorts of traffic. Anyway, made it there safely and they […]

January 13, 2026

ShowLog – Deland – 1/(10-11)/2026

ur report actually begins a day earlier. Our club has recently dipped our rail joiners into T-Trak. It’s very easy and popular (and a hell of a lot simpler than them wooden Trojan horses we built in our N-Trak days). So the evening pre-show, Shannon and Zeus (two n-trak knuckleheads) were out at the fairgrounds setting up. It went together pretty easy (even though there was a case of elevated curves being installed backwards, turning them into escape-velocity curves). But the new layout was pretty much up and running in time for the show. That being said, the show went […]

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 […]