robert.admin – Page 57 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

March 5, 2023

Drake’s Drum (Review)

nd finally we finish (for now) the war against the creepy virus which takes over entire races and uses them as total brain-slaves, grinding its subjects into ruin as it continues with a full wartime economy (because what else would there be) as it attempts to take over the universe. So, in this Ark Royal installment (number XVII, but who’s counting), humanity decides to move against the virus’s homeworld (totally built up, nothing but an over-polluted, totally factoried system worked by mindless slaves (the goal of the current governor of Florida, no doubt)). But the humans cannot send anything of […]

March 3, 2023

On Sheet – Time and Time again!

ince this is a blog about model train operations, I’m going to talk about time (since railroads and time, historically and modeled, are intertwined). Railroads live and die on the clock. Railroad operations are why we have standardized time zones today. You can’t run massive equipment in a delicately-balanced orchestration of time and place if every town consults its rusty clock tower for the local time. It needs to be standardized. Now, I’ve blogged about time before, HERE. This was an answer for those people who think that clocks equal stress and stress is no fun. If you can run […]

March 2, 2023

Breakfast Club (DOG EAR)

ne of the best things about retirement is having time on my side again. Sure, I’m busy. I’ve got a lot going on. But now I can schedule things a bit more… humanly. Recently I had a pair of breakfast dates in the book. One was with a friend Steve, where we’d meet at Perkins and then go over to get a helpless railroader’s trains running again. The other was with my friend Chris, where we’d meet at Maple Street Cafe and then go to his house for a short little ops session on his CSX-Taft layout. Both of them […]

February 27, 2023

OpsLog – WAZU – 02/26/2023

n Amtrak train drifts up to a weatherstained industrial structures. Down its flanks, the doors bang open. For a moment, silence. Then, the passengers of ill-fated Train 22 drift out onto the broken concrete loading dock outside the shuttered factory. They cannot find their conductor. All the attendants have vanished. The engine idles, driverless and abandoned. There are no answers. As night falls, various groups of passengers drift off, seeking help and civilization. Some are picked off by drug-addicted homeless grungers. Others are eaten by mooses. Carnivorous deer pick off a few. One surprised passenger is killed by Big Foot. […]

February 26, 2023

Barbary (Review)

his reads like a YA SciFi (and if I got it wrong, well, I’ll apologize and note that the writing is smooth and simple). It’s just a tidy little space opera from 1986, a story of a girl (Barbary) who was orphaned when her mother died ages ago in a space station high over Earth. However, it seems like some of her mother’s friends would like to adapt her and send for her. But getting to the space station is not easy, especially when you are smuggling a cat onboard. I kinda suspected that this was what was in her […]

February 24, 2023

On Sheet – Tuscarora Realization!

ddest thing. We’ve been running my diminutive Tuscarora Branch Line for two an a half years. Now, this tiny layout runs under Time Table & Train Orders (a method where trains follow their timetables but modify their efforts based on train orders from the dispatcher). Now, I’m not going to say that we’re perfect in our execution of the method – selective compression and all that. But it seemed to work and everyone likes the sessions. Orders got passed. It felt “railroady”. So, here’s the actual track schematic on the west side of the railroad. Westly is the coal mine (and while […]

February 23, 2023

Goodnight, Moon (DOG EAR)

he other night I had just shut off the light (and fired up the CPAP) to go to sleep. I lay in the dark, thinking of tomorrow’s events. I’d be getting up early and driving way down into Disney territory (i.e. Occupied Reedy Creek) to meet with a friend for breakfast. Then we’d go over to a guy’s place in Champion’s Gate (where the elite prop up their feet) to help him get an old layout running again (and hopefully scraping up some club donations). I know traffic around Disney can be crazy so I decided to get there early. […]

February 23, 2023

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/22/2023

teve Hooper is going to hate reading this, but tonight we ran every train (freights, passengers, and even some units trains and extras) and we ran it pretty much on time. Sorry, Steve. When I took the hot seat tonight, I felt a lot of pressure to get this session down right. After all, the last one was a shambles (sorry again, Steve). We had to show that the entire thing could come together and run like a true railroad. This was doubly important because we were using our new freight flows from Nazareth. Yeah, so, no pressure but it’s […]

February 20, 2023

OpsLog – TY&E – 02/19/2023

ifficult day on the TY&E. Our host JW was in it up to his red ears, even up to his horns. Look, I know that hosting can be difficult. I’ve even had terrible sessions on Tuscarora. On my Cuesta, I used to dread sessions (and truthfully, it might be why I’m slow to return it to service). Hosting a session can really run a person ragged. The only thing I know is that if ten guys run on your layout and each has a minor problem, they’ve had a fun time with very little in the way of issues. But […]

February 19, 2023

Fighting for the Crown (Review)

ezus! Ark Royal XVII. Who’d have thought that those five books I picked up at that used bookstore in Norfolk would have resulted in this, hundreds of dollars and pages, all to get through the several interstellar wars humanity has faced. So you’ll remember the two characters from the last book, Captains Hammond and Campbell of the Lion and the Unicorn, night and day, thoughtful and bold, and seemingly totally unable to work with one another. Well, in this book, humanity is faced with a desperate situation – the virus which controls four races (that we know of) is building […]