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November 14, 2019

Stacking up (DOG EAR)

eople told me that after I retired, I’d end up with less time than ever before. Gotta say they were right. In one week, I will have had three cabbie jobs, taking people to medical appointments. Cycling, well, that’s down to one thirty-mile ride and maybe some afternoon scratch. Had a train show all last weekend.  And I’ve got the paperwork for my model railroad I’m developing. And the cleaning of same. So, yes, busy busy. My writing output on the web is nil. Readers have been asking, but what can I tell them? And looking over, right now at […]
November 11, 2019

Nemesis Games (Review)

nother installment of the Expanse series (is that what it’s really called, or is that just the amazing scifi show it spawned?). Fake writer James S.A. Corey (he’s actually two guys) keeps this chapter in the big sprawling series back in our own solar system. The whole thousands-of-colonies-await-you bit is kept to a minimum – this books is about the four principles – Jim, Naomi, Alex and Amos, as they part ways for “small errands” that should have been corner-store-walks but don’t end that way, given the fact that the OPA (Outer Planets Alliance, i.e. the skinny low-grav belters) are […]
November 11, 2019

ShowLog – Makers Faire – 11/9-10/2019

was ready to hate this show. I didn’t want to do it. We were understaffed last year and the crowds ripped shit off the layout. It was two days of hand-to-hand combat. I didn’t vote for us to go but when we did agree to attend, I showed up for all the days (Friday setup and both running days). And it wasn’t too bad, actually. I thought the setup was going to be a continuing cock-up from last year, where at start time we had three guys. No, this time we had plenty – all sorts of hands, all sorts […]
November 7, 2019

Ailments (DOG EAR)

s you can see HERE and HERE and even HERE, I attended a huge model train operations session in San Diego. Had a lot of fun (and felt pretty good that people refer to me as “the writer guy”). I even sat on a siding for a few hours, chatting with my helper crew about literature and favorite books. However, writing (and the idiosyncrasies of such) always give me pause for thought. And I was really thinking about it when my butt started to burn. See, ops are about long hours on your feet, of climbing stairs and crawling under […]
November 6, 2019

OpsLog – Tehachapi – 11/3/2019

last left you at the point where, at the head-end of a flat-car motherload of a freight, I looked into the grim future and wondered what would happen next. We resume. “Car on the ground! We’re  scissoring!” It’s ten minutes into the Sunday session and we’ve left Cliff for the hidden helix under Rowan. And of course, in those tight clearances, we’ve accordioned four flatcars on the ground, the in dark close confines of the helix. What a mess. That was pretty much the worst of it – I pocketed the cars and put them back into the cut once […]
November 5, 2019

OpsLog – Tehachapi – 11/2/2019

oday I experienced the full range of railroader emotions. In the morning, Cal (my Arvin buddy from the day before) and I took a beet train up the hill. That was the idea, anyway. We got to one of the dispatcher dead zones (where we can’t be contacted, perched along a desolate ledge named, quite rightly, as “Cliff”). And that’s when an opposing train we were supposed to meet there suffered a mechanical breakdown  and didn’t show – no show, no go. And before he could arrive and liberate us, the passenger trains descended on us like sharks on a […]
November 5, 2019

OpsLog – Tehachapi – 11/1/2019

o sum up my day in a word – orange. For the first day of my Tehachapi train operations adventure, me and a Canadian named Cal were teamed up on an all-day effort, the Arvin job. For this, we picked up power off the ATSF ready track at Bakersfield and scurried through Kern Junction at 8am sharp, running for Magunden and the branch line there. From there, it’s a very short hop through the backdrop to the hidden world of Arvin, a place where evidently all the potatoes in the world come from. And that was our day, pulling blocks […]
October 31, 2019

Hello, Darkness, my old friend (Dog Ear)

’ve got a trip to make this weekend, a flight across the country to San Diego to run prototype operations at the La Mesa club, a sprawling layout with dozens of guys that work twelve hour shifts to completely model the workings of an actual railroad (here, between Mojave and Bakersfield in the 1950s) all the way down to the terminology and carbon paper. It’s a fun time travel game where you’ll stand around doing nothing (the railroad way) and grab food on the run. And why am I noting this on my writing blog? Did I select the wrong […]
October 27, 2019

Starrigger (Review)

o this was one from the recovered attic book boxes, a rollicking space opera in a strange universe. On Pluto (according to backstory), giant cylinders were discovered with a road leading into them. If you went fast enough and stayed right on the center line, you’d pop through to another planet. Eventually enough gates were mapped to establish the Terrain Maze, a collection of planets that we’ve colonized. But there are other gates, pot lock portals, that lead God knows where. And every so often, on these mega freeways, strange aliens in stranger cars can be seen. Our protagonist in […]
October 27, 2019

OpsLog – FEC – 10/26/2019

o today (or was it simulated tonight?) we used the F from FEC for “Fast”. It was the overnight shift, a time when the Florida East Coast moves manifests, juice trains and very lost coal trains. I was out in the layout, running this time. First train was a general freight with a call in at Cocoa for some swaps – easy work. And then, after a bit of a sit, I ran a fast manifest – straight through. Both of these might sound dull but with sound-equipped engines you can still have fun blowing at the gates and ringing […]