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April 25, 2019

OpsLog – LM&O – 4/24/2019

t’s crazy the way this railroad runs. If you go back through the LM&O blogs, you’ll find Harris Glen mentioned prominently. This is because it’s a long hard climb to the top, trains stall, it’s a lot of curving single track and, frankly, it was engineered to be a bottleneck. We were so clever. But tonight the beast slept. I don’t know why it was – we ran nearly everything in the roster – but Harris Glen was quiet. Oh, trains ran through but there wasn’t the desperate parade back and forth. No, this time the river route was pretty […]
April 25, 2019

KittyLog – 4/24/2019

ast night I woke up at 2am. Wondered what was going on in the house. Found the doors open in the Florida room, but Chinki and Ritz hanging close to the night light. Apparently our dark and sizable (sic) house scared them. So taking one in each hand, I carried them back to the bedroom and put them aboard. They found it interesting – lots of whisker-bristling excitement. Looking out the back window was a real gas for them. And then Chinki started hanging around the edge of the bed so I lifted her down. Off she trotted, back to […]
April 23, 2019

KittyLog – 4/22/2019

ell, we got our two kitties last night, Chinki (a Hindi word employed for cute daughters and such) and Ritz. We decided that this time we’ll get two so they won’t be lonely when left alone (and can destroy the house together). When we got them home Monday night, we decided to keep them in the Florida room for the first night (where their poo-box and food is) so they’d stabilize to the environment. We sat out there for the evening, watching them play and explore. They kept their distance, slightly nervous around us. However, later in the evening I […]
April 21, 2019

Cibola Burn (Review)

his one’s the fourth book of the series that would turn into TV’s Expanse, a sprawling space saga that deals with humans, their curiosity (or greed or lust for power, something like that), leftover weaponizable alien goo from a long-dead race, a star gate, a virgin planet, and the crew of the Rocinante. In a nutshell – refugees from the war over Ganymede cooked through the jumpgate opened at the end of book three. They claim (i.e. they land on) a planet in one of the newly-opened system. Turns out its also a planet a corporate has claimed, and their […]
April 21, 2019

OpsLog – FEC – 4/20/2019

he Orlando Boys really shined today on the Florida East Coast RR. Bob and I got demerits (me for dropping the wrong car at a siding, him for running over a turnout the wrong way). And John, he didn’t get a demerit – he got summery execution for the horror of what happened up in Frontenac (we won’t speak of it. It involved sixteen coal hoppers, a lot of industrial track and a whole bunch of time). I still think I got the short end of it. If anything, the shipper should be happy. He was getting ready to ship […]
April 18, 2019

A new beginning (DOG EAR)

ou might have noticed (please, someone notice) that my site has been pretty quiet as of late. The reason for this was my www-based ancient Joomla webpage had been hacked (again). It first came to my attention when the astronomy site booted off one of my blogs, claiming I had malware. But then my wife chirped up, saying she’d seen it too. Maybe you did – the whole survey results thing you’d first click through via my links? Once I mentioned this, everyone I knew said, “Yes, I thought that was something you did.” Please, I’d rather mug you with […]
April 14, 2019

OpsLog – WBRR – 4/13/2019

‘m usually a pretty outgoing person – lost a few jobs by shooting my mouth off. Very, very noisy, a real chatty Cathy. At the Western Bay, I’m in charge of the center aisle. Everything that goes on there goes through me. I tell the dispatcher what’s going on. I relay his orders to the crews. At one point, when 242 was fussing around in the Placerville Jct. lead and I heard on the wire that a mail train was coming west, I advised the dispatcher to advance him to Dolores (one of my stations) while my alter-ego at the […]
April 14, 2019

ShowLog – Deland – 4/6/2019

ight… nine… ten…” My black shoes pace across the cold concrete floor. It’s seven in the morning and I’m an hour from home and bed. “Eleven… twelve… thirteen.” Blue tape. All stop. I look around the quiet convention center. Our promised twenty-two feet of width is actually thirteen. We’ve been bungled by nine-feet. Not so much, but its further then a man can reach. It’s the distance the condemned falls through the hangman’s trap door. And it’s a full module-and-a-half of distance we can’t afford to lose. Steve, our module engineer, comes in. I nod to him. “Problem here.” And […]
April 14, 2019

OpsLog – LMO – 3/27/2019

’m hosting our daily meeting. One of our developers, a child thirty years my junior, is unhappy with the direction my team is now going. So he’s sniping at me, little schoolyard comments. I stop the meeting. “If you have something to say, let’s hear it,” I let him run his mouth a bit. “You done? Fine.” Then I go back to my agenda. He, in turn, runs off to cry at the manager, only to find out that, woops, he was wrong all along. That was my day job. In my real-life job, I’m at the throttle of a […]
April 14, 2019

OpsLog – FEC – 3/16/2019

ne of the stunning things about Ken Farnham’s FEC layout is how busy the main yard is. San Diego’s La Mesa club might have three to five engines moving across their Bakersfield Yard (and it’s, I dunno, 150 feet long?). But Ken’s is inside a small shed with the yardmaster, the classification crew, the trim operator, the hostler all working, even with one or two mainline trains transitioning the limits. The yard throat is a happening place. Today what made it cool for me was that I was working classification, breaking down arrivals, and the next track over wife JB […]