robert.admin – Page 58 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

November 13, 2022

The Classic Railway Signal Tower (Review)

od, I wish I’d had this book before programming TUSK tower, my computer-driven interlocking tower on my Tuscarora Branch Line railroad. More on that in a bit. So, Interlocking Towers are those control-tower-looking-structures you used to see along railroad lines. They came about because sending crews scrambling about in the middle of the night, in the rain, to align a route for the express sometimes ended up with hard feelings and smoldering causalities. Interlocking Towers were the computers of their era (from the 1880s to the 1960s). The operator, standing in his high perch, would use long levers to set […]

November 11, 2022

On Sheet – On the subject of sheets

n most model railroads, dispatchers usually uses a magnetic board to move trains. Sure, you’ve seen them – a map of the railroad (usually made with thin tape on a metal shelf) where little magnets with train symbols on them are moved about to show the location (or limit of authority) of a train. I’ve even written an Excel sheet that does just that, allowing the user to double click on a train and then double click on the desired location of a train. It works better since it shows EVERY location of the train, not just the start and […]

November 10, 2022

Word of Mouth (DOG EAR)

aybe this is one of the reasons the world is so fucked up. Oral histories. And their demise. It used to be, well before the 1920s, that people would get their opinions and world views from two places; books and word of mouth. If they knew anything about, say, World War One, they’d either read it (such as All Quiet on the Western Front) or directly hear it (possibly from Uncle Frank, who’d served with the American Expeditionary Force). They would get their insights either from an author (backed by his editor and publisher) or an uncle. Stories and accounts […]

November 6, 2022

Para Bellum (Review)

have to say this, but if you are an Ark Royal series fan and have not read this book yet (the 13th in the series), well, SPOILERS AHEAD. So we discovered in the last book that a virus has corrupted at least three races and is eager to add more to its fold. That generation ship that came into human space and was allowed to land on a colony world was lousy with viruses.Yes, we think it was contained but there are some freighters that called on the world are missing. And now HMS Invincible has been assigned a small […]

November 6, 2022

OpsLog – FEC – 11/5/2022

uite a crazy day (and night) on the Florida East Coast. Worst bit – in mid-session in the yard shed, there was a turntable fire which filled the room with fumes and knocked out the table. The table itself, normally able to be lifted off, seems welded in place. That really sucks – I’ve run the hostler job and really like the table. Out in the main room, there were the usual issues, including a train getting stuck in the runnel and one operator determined to run through all our defect cards (and that would be Kyle, who scored three […]

November 5, 2022

OpsLog – P&WV – 11/4/2022

kay, so we got to run on the Pittsburgh and West Virginia today, a sort of retirees session held in the middle of a Friday when all the good people of the world are working hard (at the car wash or other places of employment). The good thing here was that, unlike our last disappointing session when over half those signing up didn’t bother to show (and our plucky dispatcher found himself in the cab, running trains and watching for headlights), we had a full crew. One guy couldn’t make it but luckily called host Tom Wilson in time for […]

November 4, 2022

On Sheet – Don’t sweat the small stuff

ou’ll probably remember how I gas-bagged about facing point locks in previous On-Sheets. These are the blue levers in an interlocking tower that lock a turnout’s points so they don’t shift while a train passes over them. It’s really cool while working a shift in the Tuscarora tower to drop the lock, throw the turnout, and relock it. In towers, I read how when the lever is pushed back from the operator (standard position), signals are red and turnouts normalized. A lever pulled towards the operator turns a signal green or reverses a turnout. Given this, I naturally assumed that […]

November 3, 2022

Too much Bleach (DOG EAR)

eah, my guilty little pleasure – anime. I love Japanese animation. For every ten series I start, one stays with me and I’ll watch it all the way through. So, there’s one called Bleach, a fairly famous and very successful franchise. It started in the mid-2000’s and ran twenty seasons of twenty episodes each.That’s about (give or take) about 400 episodes. That’s a lot of bleach. It hit me while I was fast-forwarding through the opening number (as I do). Hulu dutifully informed me that I still had something like 730 episodes unwatched. Since half are subbed and half dubbed […]

October 30, 2022

Railroad Signalling (Review)

his book came to me through sad circumstances. One of our train club members passed away a while ago and his widow asked if we’d like his train books. What I didn’t know is that there would be two eight-foot shelves packed with books. It took three trips in a loaded Jetta to get them to the club (and yes, club members, I’ll pay for them). Anyway, the guy I was lugging loads with pointed this one out to me – Railroad Signalling by Brian Solomon. Now, I’ve gotten model railroad books about signalling that were kinda meh – all […]

October 28, 2022

On Sheet – The Great P&LE Strike!

n our last blog posting, we talked about simulating things that aren’t really there (specifically facing-point locks and various assorted paperworks). The thing is, operations can be more than the trains and the waybills. They can be expanded to include anything you can imagine. Like a violent labor altercation. I mentioned at the end of that On Sheet how you could simulate union dues with your operators (by passing a coffee can around). That got me to thinking about an actual strike I was involved in on a friend’s railroad. My buddy Ed (who passed away a few years back) […]