Blog – Page 167 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 29, 2021

OpsLog – FEC – 08/28/2021

o it was a training day on the Florida East Coast. Given the confusions that the new Pinetta Industrial Area has faced, Ken invited a smaller group, broke us into two teams and had us run through the AM and PM shift. This meant that I got a glare when my wife (who is perfectly happy doing the yardmaster job) got posted to the AM engineer. Me, I’d come in at that shift and dumped the inbound cars, the the mainline background job. She wasn’t very happy when she settled in her seat and started running her RS-3 up and […]

August 29, 2021

I, Robot (Review)

here are three Laws of Robotics that all robots must follow: First Law: A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm. Second Law: A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. Third Law: A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law. This makes sense – you don’t want robots to kill, yet you don’t want robots to damage themselves (unless to prevent their […]

September 2, 2021

Generational Eagles (Dog Ear)

o years back, I used to watch Space 1999, a cool-back-then not-so-cool-on-streaming-now show. The premise (now laughable, since I am much older and wiser) is that the moon has a nuclear stockpile which blows up, driving the moon away from Earth. Far away. As in, it passes a new planet with new dangers every week. Okay, well, space is big. First, it would take hundreds, thousands, millions of years for the moon to get to any other star that way. And who’s to say that, with the vastness of space, it would even pass anywhere close to any star? But […]

September 5, 2021

Hell’s Gate (Review)

ill Schutt, an author and Zoologist, has created a very Indiana Jonesy hero with his Captain R. J. MacCready, a special operative in World War Two who is sent in when special forces have failed. If you like your action mysterious, hot and kinda on the weird side, you’ll love his writing. His Hell’s Gate was one I picked up on disk to listen on a long vacation drive. I enjoyed it but my wife drifted off to look at passing scenery. That’s kinda how it always plays with Crichton-esh books. Anyway, this one has an interesting concept. Two German […]

September 9, 2021

War of the Writers (DOG EAR)

nyone who knows me knows I love H.G. Well’s War of the Worlds. It was a book that opened up the world for younger me and showed me things I really didn’t understand. So nobody was more excited than I when I found out that BBC was doing a miniseries on WOTW, set (for once) in the actual timeframe of the book (1900 or so). Finally! What a disaster. We were finally able to watch it on Vudu. Yeah, so commercials every few minutes. But that wasn’t the worst of it. It was this fact: The writers thought that they […]

September 12, 2021

Out Stealing Horses (Review)

his was another of the CD’s we listened to on our summer vacation drive (a CD can make the miles go by but I fear they will go the way of VHS soon enough). The wife picked this one out. So we listened. The story told starts at what should be the end – Trond Sander is an older man, ready to live out the remains of his life in contemporary times out in the Norwegian boonies. But then he encounters a man who grew up with him when he was a child, back when the Nazis invaded during World […]

September 16, 2021

Uncork (DOG EAR)

‘m not proud of what I did, but I did it and I’ll stand by it. A few days ago I lost a longtime friend to Covid. He chose not to get his shot and paid the price. I can’t be sure why he made this decision but I have to think that part of it was the symphony of misinformation and bald-faced lies about the safety of the shots and the dangers of Covid. His choice. However. A day after hearing of his passing, someone on Facebook started with the misinformation again, questioning masks, blaming the current administration for […]

September 19, 2021

OpsLog – TBL – 9/18/2021

kay, ran a solo session of the Tuscarora (which I’ve done before) but only the coal side of things (which I’ve never done before). Since it was pointed out that it was a “spear-carrier” position on the railroad, I added a card game to give the operator some decision-making abilities in the session. Now there is a back story to every train. And here’s what I learned today. First off, it was a very busy session for me. I ran full switch-tower operations. And dispatcher. And the coal engineer. And the brakeman (on both sides of the layout) so yes, […]

September 19, 2021

Legacy of War (Review)

‘ve been a fan of the African functionalist Wilbur Smith for decades. He writes wonderful books about the continent, both in the modern day and the ancient past. And one of his loose series is about the Courtney family that finds itself settling in Africa after World War One and building their dynasty, accumulating rotters and villains along the way. Legacy of War is no different (a little more about that in my conclusion). This book opens just after World War Two. Saffron Courtney has been Mata Haring all about Europe during the war, doing those crazy resistance things and […]

September 21, 2021

OpsLog – TBL – 9/20/2021

ery busy night at the club. First there was the work session that went on until 8pm – we worked elements of Pittsburgh, fixed two turnouts, argued about signposts (bit one off in a dare – really), and then designed the steel mill trackage. After all that, everyone left and so I pulled out my Tuscarora Microlayout and had a coal session. Why? Well, we’re going to have a live session and I’m still working out the card method that drives the coal moves. As noted in earlier blogs, an engineer pointed out that coal felt meaningless – it was […]