robert.admin – Page 56 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

December 18, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 12/17/2022

he engineer on train 244 curses under his breath as he ground his units up the long hill towards Harris Glen. For no reason at all – except to be ornery – the dispatcher had issued a train order for 244 to meet 247 at the base of the grade – Pittsburgh – rather than midway up as timetabled. It would have been an easy meet but for management sticking its long nose into train-running business. So now 244 was late, and that meant that, given the hard meets the railroad was running, passenger 97 would be dawdling at Lehigh, […]

December 16, 2022

On Sheet – Handle with Care

e’ve all seen it on the highways. The person who looks down (at their phone) just as the light changes green. The person on a freeway exit lane who misses the big green signs (with the yellow EXIT ONLY markers) and slows everyone down with a panic-merge. The people who frenetically fly past, going down the right lane when there is clearly, obviously a truck chugging along, which boxes them in and makes them madder and drive even crazier. People are terrible drivers. They don’t learn from their mistakes. They don’t put the attention into it that it requires. And […]

December 15, 2022

Rejected (DOG EAR)

nteresting find today. I was going through my drafts and found one from a year or so old. It was a bit where, in high school, I made friends with a guy from the smoking lounge and thought that, by knowing me and playing military games with me, he’d maybe take a higher path in life. But then I went over to his house (shabby and run-down) and met his drunken, abusive father. The guy slapped the shit out of his son and then told me to get the f**k out. Which I did. I never hung out with the […]

December 14, 2022

OpsLog – TBL – 12/13/2022

o we had ordered supplies for Wensleydale Feed and Grain (namely 4000 cattle bibs). The Chesapeake and Ohio shipped it to our hometown – Tuscarora – via the Pennsy. I spotted them dropping it on the team track siding as I drove home from the bar, right as promised, midnight. I’d be there with the boys to unload it the next day. So we had the door open and the truck backed up at 8am sharp. With donuts, coffee and fish stories, they boys didn’t really get working until 8:45. We’d only just gotten everyone aboard and ready to grunt […]

December 11, 2022

The Guns of Avalon (Review)

ook two from the 1970’s classic series, the Nine Princes in Amber, The Guns of Avalon. As I mentioned in the first review, nine princes scrabble for the throne of the primary realm in a sea of shadow possibilities after the king goes missing. Our protagonist, Corwin, just made an attempt to seize the throne from his brother Eric, leading a massive army in a truly epic series of battles that I remembered some forty years later. Corwin loses and is thrown into a dungeon with his eyes burned out of his skull. But the princes of Amber are of strong […]

December 9, 2022

On Sheet – YardBirds

ur club has been developing ops for two decades. We’ve also gone through three freight routing systems. Right now we’re very happy with disposable waybills. We also only had one yard (Martin). It’s a staffed yard with a crew. There is another yard on the other side of the hill, Calypso. It had nothing going on and is unstaffed. So for the last ten years, there has been a cut of thirty cars in both yards. As inbound trains from staging come into the yards, they stop at the first yard, add a cut of ten cars (we call these […]

December 8, 2022

You call yourself a writer? (DOG EAR)

f there is one thing that peeves me, it’s when I misspell something (as I just did for mispell) and someone tosses that comment my way; “I thought you were a writer.” It happened the other day. Was at a party and some of the younger goers wanted to play a tile-based game where you kinda play scrabble against each other in a dead-heat rush. So out of three games, I didn’t win at all (though on the second, I was a contender). But at the end of the third game, two of the more-successful players actually took my tiles […]

December 5, 2022

OpsLog – FEC – 12/4/2022

he second day of my all-ops weekend played out even better than I could have hoped for. The drive was easy, traffic light. We met a couple of club members at Wendy’s before the session, to chat about the coming effort (one of the members for a newbie, so that helped him (or filled him with horrifying regrets)). And then we went over, met the rest of the bunch and filed out to the two sheds to get things rolling. Kyle was on the panel and I had light road duties, meaning with one train, I stripped out every car […]

December 5, 2022

OpsLog – WBRR – 12/3/2022

hings on the Western Bay railroad get better and better. We had a new dispatcher today – he wasn’t all that versed in TT&TO (but who is – I’m giving a clinic at a convention next month on the topic). But he rolled with the punches and did very well. Three of us operated seven stations – I gotta get Al to let us start issuing train orders someday (I’ve got some ideas – also mentioned in my clinic). But otherwise the crews made their meets and switched their cars. The superintendent doesn’t trust them one bit but they are […]

December 4, 2022

The Right of the Line (Review)

think I always say this, but “Another book of the Ark Royal series…” Yes, this is the fourteenth of the series that started for me in a used bookstore in Norfolk, Va and ended up on my straining bookshelf. For those of you who don’t religiously (because I post these every Sunday?) reviews, the Ark Royal series follows a cast of evolving (and perishing) characters through a near space-n-time setting, that being the English Navy two or so centuries hence. We’ve fought several alien races so far, and nearly gotten squashed, but this time we are facing Earth’s biggest threat – a […]