Blog – Page 165 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 1, 2021

The Contracting Expanse (DOG EAR)

kay, here’s your warning – if you are a fan of the show The Expanse, you’d better sheer off right now. Spoilers regarding the conclusion of the fifth season lay ahead. Did they all leave? So. Alex’s death. I’ve read the series up through book eight and, of course, Alex does not die. The fab four (James, Naomi, Amos and Alex) remain alive and continually fixing the universe, up into old age. Well, to be truthful, something weird happens to Amos but he’s alive. Sorta. Well, kinda. But Alex is very much alive. But not in the show. At the […]

July 4, 2021

OpsLog – TBL – 07/03/2021

here is something quite unique about the Tuscarora Branch Line. Granted, it’s a small layout, only 2×4. But when Greg and I were doing our two-person session yesterday, it was like we were connected to a huge layout, managing a single town as the local switched and coal hoppers paraded past. Good session, too. Everything ran perfect. I think we had one derailment that might have been rough uncoupling. As far as the on-the-ground action, we had quite a session. First off, it seemed that the railroad had let a backlog of empty hoppers build up to the east – […]

July 4, 2021

Mr American (Review)

hat better title to review on this Independence Day than Mr. American, a delightful novel from George MacDonald Fraser, the author of the groundbreaking Flashman novels. The novel begins with Mr. Mark Franklin, a soft spoken Yankee, debarking from a liner in Liverpool in 1909. In his possession are the following curious items: a copy of Shakespeare’s works, an old Mexican charro saddle and two Remington pistols in his battered luggage. And also, it seems a bank note for a large amount of money. Mark journeys first to London and meets the beautiful and vivacious ‘Pip’ Delys, a music hall […]

July 6, 2021

OpsLog – TBL – 07/05/2021

uick entry but not a duplicate. Yes, we ran the Tuscarora on Saturday. But on Monday there wasn’t much work-session stuff going on so I decided to run a solo session. Ran up a sheet for a switcher local and boosted the effort by two additional cars (the maximum). I gotta say, this is the railroading I built the Tuscarora for. I just ran through the switching, taking about 90 minutes to do so. The Pee-Dee was easy – did it in minimal moves. As it stood, at the end, I wished I’d run off two sheets – I could […]

July 8, 2021

Two Things (DOG EAR)

here are two things I can’t work out in sixty two years of life. I just don’t understand them. Oh, there are lots of things I don’t understand in our world. Wives confuse me. The inability of people to respond/confirm in this interconnected world (or even to be on time) throw me off. Simplistic political statements baffle me (why would you go on record posting anything like that?). The fact that people show what good drivers they are by driving badly. The world is a confusing place. But here, I’m talking about two things that are binary simplicities that I […]

July 11, 2021

No Man’s Land (Guest Review)

ntil one of our neighbors down the street from us loaned me her copy of No Man’s Land by Wendy Moore I was unaware of this book and unaware of the history of Endell Street Hospital. Thanks to our neighbor I now have had the opportunity to read it. Per the dust jacket, this is the story of “The trailblazing women who ran Britain’s most extraordinary military hospital during World War I.” The suffragette doctors, Louisa Garrett Anderson and Flora Murray, set up and ran the Endell Street Military Hospital in the heart of London. The hospital, staffed entirely by […]

July 11, 2021

ShowLog – Deland – 7/10/2021

ell, it’s been a while. With Covid, it’s been over a year since we did our last Volusia Fairgrounds show. I had concerns (as I always do) about layout functionality. However, we set up the day before (just in case) and found out that everything was fine and dandy. One turnout needed a bit of TLC, and one section of track lost power. All easily fixed. Then a number of cleaning passes and we were good to go. We even logged our normal setup time – about 1:15, so yay us! The show was something else. Me, I was in […]

July 15, 2021

CYON (DOG EAR)

enjoy creating CYOAs – to explain what this is, it means “Choose your own adventure”. Originally they were books you’d buy that let you decide the direction of the adventure in the fashion of “If you want to drink from the magic well, go to page 5, otherwise go to page 6”. You would make your choice, flip to that page, and live (or die) from it. Since then, it’s been computerized. While most of them (like the books that proceeded them) are one-time throughs (of course, you could play through additional times and see how other paths run). But […]

July 18, 2021

Berlin Alexanderplatz (Review)

ecently I rode a bike the length and back of the Van Fleet Trail in Florida, sixty total miles of arrow-straight trail through thick Florida swamps. In the end, I barely made it, coasting over the finish line to collapse in a crumpled heap on a bench. Berlin Alexanderplatz was kinda like that. The novel is told in the whimsical, wandering form of Ulysses, a tale of an ex-con (Franz Biberkopf), released back onto the streets of Berlin in 1928. He makes a go at being honest, really tries by selling newspapers, shoelaces, and joining the Merchant’s Union. However, like […]

July 18, 2021

OpsLog – TBL – 07/17/2021

nother busy day on the Tuscarora. I thought we were going to have four people but because of sweeping Covid fears, the father/son team I invited had to cancel. And that left me with 50% crew. In a normal ops session, a disaster. But the modular functionality Tuscarora Branch Line can run as easily with one as it can with four. So with Greg (my long-time engineer who has been with this project from the start) we set all signals to green, coupled in the mini-tower (which lets an operator easily run the layout) and began. He ran the local […]