Blog – Page 130 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

December 9, 2018

OpsLog – FEC – 11/17/2018

ell, if mistakes were a physical thing, we could have spread them on every slice of a loaf. And put it on thick. Goofup sandwiches for everyone. I mean, pretty much everyone was B-listing on today’s session. The dispatcher was cratering on the panel, just struggling to get traffic moving. And across the division, mistakes were rampant. I saw trains sitting on wrong tracks, trains dropping cars at the wrong place, paperwork going into the wrong boxes, even trains T-boning other trains. Got in an argument with the superintendent about my train taking the wrong yard exit track. But no, […]

December 9, 2018

OpsLog – LM&O – 11/28/2018

t was the Tale of Two Kiddies at the club tonight. First, we had AJ, a young guy who’d come the week before and have found the idea of ops cool. So I invited him to this week’s session and so he’d shown. Since I’d just gotten booted off the panel by Cody (right after setting up my patented 202/SB2 flyby) I picked up the Harris Glen Local. So AJ and I ran up and did the lumber and limestone shifts. I even let the kid figure his own moves (he had a great time figuring out how to do […]

December 9, 2018

End of Watch (Review)

icked this one up (as I usually do) in a used bookstore. And as I started reading, I realized it was a continuation from another Stephen King novel I’d read, Mister Mercedes. And that crazy kook from the first novel (with his nasty backstory) is now geeked up in an intensive care hospital, his brains all mushed from a sack of ball bearings swung by plucky Holly just as he’d been about to detonate his bomb in a kiddy concert and scythe down something like 2,000 preteen girls (you say it like it’s a bad thing, right?). But let me […]

December 12, 2018

Alas, Blogtorium (DOG EAR)

’m not dead. Nor is the Blogtorium. But it’s late, I know, but there were reasons. Some time ago I noticed that the Blogatorium (where you are now reading this) was down. Really down. Nothing but the pen, the word “Manuscript”, the tan screen and nothing else. Now I’ve gone down once before – for GoDaddy issues (it came up two days later). But this time they weren’t suffering any national malware attacks. And I’d just agreed to some service plan where they would nightly scan my site for malware and whatever. Yes, my site has been knocked on before. […]

December 15, 2018

ShowLog – Tampa – 12/15/2018

his was a new one for us, a long ride over to the west coast for a show. Of course, there were two club-related hospitalizations and heavy rains to cope with, but other than that, everything went well. We managed to hold to our schedule and everyone showed up. Unlike Makers Farce, we had more than enough people to do this and everyone pitched in. Better, we all proceeded slooooow, so outside of the sign stand breaking (again) we set up in our usual hour and had things running when the crowds came in. Overall, the show was a real […]

December 16, 2018

The Gum Thief (Review)

like Douglas Coupland’s work. I really enjoyed Generation X and his gritty observations of modern Americana. And The Gum Thief, which I’d intended to last a week of easy reading got brushfired-off in one weekend (I was at a train operating session and there was a lot of down time between runs). So the novel is an interesting store about intertwined relationships, all that begins, laughingly (or depressingly enough) in a Staples store. Two of the drones here, Bethany the goth chick and Roger, the washed-out forty-year-old life failure, suffer through their days in this bleak consumer hell. But the […]

December 19, 2018

OpsLog – LM&O – 12/19/2018

ake a good look at this picture. This is Red Rock, a siding in the middle of nowhere on the western flank of the Appalachians. It’s full of trains. If you follow the rails east to the opposite flank, you’ll find Lehigh siding. It was really fulla trains. I think at one point we had six pushing down that furnace-side main-siding combo. We had a full, full house – guests and new members and visitors from England and, who knows, maybe a Martian out there. In the course of the evening, we ran every scheduled train and a load of […]

December 20, 2018

Alas, Blogtorium II (DOG EAR)

o, last week I mentioned the week I was down for a crash. That was in November. So where was my site since then? Well, I’d mentioned my vow, how I would run official backups through GoDaddy (and not these self-launched efforts I’d been laboring with). I called them and signed up for the program. No problems. The tech checked my site and said it would be fine (refer to the blog before this on how fine “fine” can be). The next day I logged into GoDaddy and checked my backups. They’d crashed. Back on tech support, it turns out […]

December 22, 2018

Leviathan Wakes (Review)

f you’ve seen The Expanse on the Sci-Fi network then you’ve seen this book (the first in a series of seven or eight). It’s set in the solar system a century or so forward from ours. Earth is a UN dominated world, Mars bold and fascist. And the belt, it’s free-wheeling yet controlled by the inner worlds (and falling more and more under the sway of the OPA (Outer Planet Alliance)). So, yes, this is a universe set for conflict and action. Into this backdrop we find four people, late crewmembers of the ice rigger Canterbury (destroyed as part of […]

December 27, 2018

Best of 2018 (DOG EAR)

s traditionally on this site (well, as of last year), here are my outstanding books from 2018. I am not ranking these in any order. Simply put, they are the best five from the 50 or so reviews I did this year. If you are looking for something to spend your Barnes & Noble gift card on, these are you best choices. Leviathan Wakes – This has become a powerful series on the Sci-Fi network, a great saga of books that follows four characters on a small stolen ship in a universe defined by our solar system (in a hundred […]