Blog – Page 172 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

December 26, 2021

Conagher (Review)

very so often, I need a mental health book. Sometimes SciFi pulls too much at me. And those recent political histories I’d dabbled into are stone-cold depressing. So I need something, the literary equivalent to eating a bucket of ice cream in my jammies. And for that, there is always Louis L’Amour. In Conagher, a young couple (married in typical economic desperation) with kids from his former wife rattle west in their wagon to start a new life. He’s built a small house in the middle of absolute nowhere. Once everyone is settled, the husband rides off to purchase cattle […]

December 30, 2021

Best of 2021 (DOG EAR)

n what is as much a tradition as weekly blog postings, I close out my year with my Best Of review of books that delighted me. And I’ll say that it was a rough year. With everything going on, I really didn’t find much of anything that lit my fire. No Oves. No Airbornes. Nothing that really lit me up as in years past. But anyway, here are the best of my reads for the plague year of 2021. RedShirts – A wonderful tale by a new master of scifi. It’s rather like Galaxy Quest but […]

January 1, 2022

OpsLog – TBL – 12/31/2021

es, I was able to round out a wonderful year of operations (with all the covid concerns) on a high note, coming back to my personal favorite, my own Tuscarora Branch Line. Now, before moving to what happened, a quick New Years Tally. Over the last year I was able to operate at the following places (ranked in order of attendance): TBL: 16 LM&O: 13 FEC: 4 WAZU: 2 WVN: 2 L&N: 2 TY&E: 1 P&WV: 1 WB: 1 So that totals out to forty-two ops sessions, pretty good all together. The Tuscarora I ran […]

January 2, 2022

The Commodore (Review)

his was one I got off the shelves at my local used bookstore, a roaring sea adventure set in the dark days of World War Two when the Japanese were pushing their ships down the “slot” and the Americans were doing everything they could to keep them from reinforcing and re-invading islands in The Solomon Islands. Into this hell-battle comes Harmon Wolf, an American Indian with his first command, a new destroyer. Wolf finds himself thinking outside the typical blue-navy box, willing to take full advantage of the new American radars to offset the threat from the Japanese Long Lance […]

January 8, 2022

OpsLog – WVN – 1/5/2022

y green West Virginia Northern RS units grunted like laboring elephants as I slowly pushed a flat car into a the New River mill, down in a river valley where the mainline ran. I’ll admit that I nearly put the flat off the end of the crude siding, distracted as I was by my paperwork spread over the oil-reeking cab. I wasn’t really confident in my work orders. See, some newbie back in Ashbury yard, a guy with no west-end switching, had built this train. And he’d gotten one or two corrections from the superintendent while doing it. Also, he’d […]

January 8, 2022

OpsLog – VSW – 1/6/2022

‘ve got a friend who like to play psychoanalyze-games with me. All of her questions are pointed and reflective. Anyway, the other day she asked, “What was your greatest accomplishment for the week?” I didn’t even have to think that one out. “I got three trains by at Ramsey.” As mentioned in my other blogs, John Wilkes Virginia SouthWestern is a great railroad with two main lines. For the Protorails convention, I was invited in to dispatch the L&N and Tom Wilson grabbed the Southern desk. Since the L&N has a higher density, we usually give the CTC panel (kinda […]

January 8, 2022

OpsLog – PWV – 1/6/2022

or those coming through this blog’s homepage, you might notice that, yes, I had two sessions on the same day. This is all about Protorails, a popular convention in town that I never get to go to because the Deland Train Show is the same weekend and I’ve got to assist. But I guess my dispatching is okay since I had two layouts request me for the same day. And yes, I do love it. So after a roaring session at the Virginia SouthWestern, it was ten miles up the interstate to Tom Wilson’s Pittsburgh & West Virginia, a steel-making, […]

January 9, 2022

Fight for your Long Day (Review)

picked this one up on the fly from a used bookstore just around the corner, a tiny epic about an adjunct instructor teaching in Philadelphia who is living an ironic life – being a collage-educated professional making less that a bartender, with no health insurance or safety net thanks to the income inequities so common everywhere in America (and the globalized world) these days. I’m kinda torn on this. Parts of it I just loved (one of them I quoted in a recent DOG EAR). At it’s best, Fight for your Long Day spoke to me as Snow Crash and […]

January 10, 2022

ShowLog – Deland – 1/9/2022

was able to attend the second day of the two-day train show (given that the proceeding three days had involved three operations sessions with hundreds of miles of highway driving and physically being on trailer duty for build day warranted a day off on Saturday). Got in at nine in the morning and started cleaning track. Overall our second show day was a pretty good day. We had a lot of visitors and a lot of kids got to run. Me, I ran black widow F3s with a long freight lashup behind them. It was pretty good running – other […]

January 13, 2022

The Cat in the Stack (DOG EAR)

veryone who knows me knows of my book Indigo, where I spent time showing how crows see the world (and how, like us, they can recognize patters, make intelligent choices, and understand a lot more than we give them credit for). This factors into my story, a tale about a book, a bookmark, and a cat. For Christmas, my wife gave me (amongst other things) a copy of the latest (and last) book of The Expanse. Now, as it has been a while since the last book, I decided to reread it before pushing into the series finale. And since […]