robert.admin – Page 60 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

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) […]

October 27, 2022

Zen (DOG EAR)

he wife and I are attending a Zen workshop held at Joybird Books, a small local bookstore. I used to read about Zen forty years ago and make efforts to meditate. I don’t know if it helped, but maybe it rounded out my bookish intelligence. Did Zen open up my worldview, or did my opening worldview include Zen? Can’t tell you. So after three classes, I’m struggling with meditation, trying to quiet my churning brain. It’s actually quite hard to sit still for twenty-five minutes and clear my thoughts. But on a walk today, I got to thinking (always am). […]

October 27, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 10/26/2022

ou’ve heard of the famous “Day of Infamy”, right? Well, at Orlando N-Trak’s October session, we had our “Night of Irony”. There was that moment when a heavy freight, overloaded with motive power, told the helper crew who offered assistance to bug off, only to flounder on the hill. Had to chuckle as I wrote the warrant to get the extra units up to shove him over the summit. And then there was the member who runs locomotives as one of his many livings, who made a dying out of misreading his issued warrant and pulling out in front of […]

October 23, 2022

Invincible (Review)

an you believe it? I’m already at book twelve of the Ark Royal series! Anyway, true to author Christopher Nuttall’s usual way of doing things, we get a three book set with the latest British hull/class in spaceships. This time, it’s the Invincible, and England is trying to see how fast attack carriers (armored, and with fighters and big guns) will work. So, shortly after its shakedown cruise, Invincible is sent to a listening station at the edge of human space. So we’ve had Pearl Harbor alien contacts, Indian history alien contacts, straight out warfare with alien contacts, but this […]

October 21, 2022

On Sheet – Illusions

n our last On Sheet, I talked about testing out ideas; my example was my interlocking tower and the control levels (specifically the train order boards). And there, I mentioned facing-point locks. I did a lot of digging while researching interlocking controls for my Tuscarora Branch Line. I learned all sorts of curious things about them, some I ignored and some I liked. But one of those neat ones were a device called a facing-point lock. I have two in my interlocking tower; you can see one of the levers (blue) in the foreground/left, and one way in the back/right. […]

October 16, 2022

Zoe’s Tale (Review)

his book, Zoe’s Tale, is the fourth book (and opener for the second 3-part set) of John Scalzi’s Old Man’s War series.Now, I’ll tell you that I loved the first set, the entire idea that when you get older, you can trade your old broken-down body (trust me on this – regardless of all the exercise and diet you work on, it still breaks down) and get a new body. The trouble is, this new super-body is yours if you work for the Colonial Defense Forces and fight for years. And never come back to Earth. Once you are all […]

October 9, 2022

OpsLog – TBL – 10/06/2022

id what I did last year at the NMRA Plant City convention, a clinic on MicroOps and how I put it together. Like last year, I put the layout up on a stand so everyone could see it, top down. Talked about it for 50 minutes. Since everyone wanted to see the tower work, I dropped the layout to a table and fired it up (happily, unlike last year, it didn’t suffer a cold solder joint). And then everyone wanted to try the interlocking tower. Great fun! Of course, this time I asked if anyone wanted to run a session […]

October 9, 2022

OpsLog – P&WV – 10/7/2022

‘m going to tread carefully on this blog post. So, like, What the fug? Tom Wilson opened up his layout for guests of the 2022 National Model Railroad Association Convention. He’d even contacted me a month before and asked if I could dispatch (don’t toss me in the briar patch, right?). With advanced signup and money on the barrel head (I forget how much I paid) we filled up the roster, a crew of nine. It was going to be a great time. I got there early, had a look at some of his new scenery, then went into the […]

October 2, 2022

The Rising Tide (Review)

guess I’ve been in a World War Two mindset these days. Saw Jeff Shaara’s The Rising Tide in one of those curbside libraries and it caught my eye. I’ve never read any of Shaara’s books and even though this is book one of three (and since it’s a used book, it’s doubtful I’ll stumble over the other two like this), I decided to give it a try. So The Rising Tide has an interesting premise – the author fictionalizes history just a bit, telling the stories of WW2 from the battles in North Africa to the Torch invasion to Sicily […]

September 30, 2022

On Sheet – Room for Improvements

ne thing about model railroad operations – you don’t have to get it right on the first try. Nobody can say exactly how something is going to work until they do it. When managing a model pike, you’ll find yourself changing things, cutting in turnouts or altering your schedule. You set something up, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. If the latter is true, you try something different. In my Tuscarora Branch Line, I thought I wanted to run a train order board so that special orders could be “hooped up” (i.e. physically passed) to the engineers. For this, you […]