Blog – Page 174 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 7, 2022

OpsLog – Hartford Division – 2/6/2022

f you found way way to the town of Waterbury in the late forties, you’d discover a dual main running through a five track yard, a busy station with full RPO operations facing it. But follow the track swinging away from the yard’s caboose track, down a long grade along a time-stained retaining wall, down to the Low Grade Yard. Here is a busy capillary for the railroad, a busting TOFC spur and a two track freight house where four doors and ramps between the cars keep the LCL freight flowing to destinations beyond Bidgeport and the Boston docks. And […]

February 11, 2022

Intentions (DOG EAR)

had a lot of intentions for this site. First off, I thought it would be a good way to drive sales (it didn’t, not really). Also, as I was moving my first book to market shelves, I thought that it would be great to make this site into a cyber coffee shop. Originally I clumped it all together, discussions about books I was reading and thoughts about publishing and media. But quickly I realized that these were two different things so I split hem into reviews (about books I read) and Dog Ear (which is about thoughts I had). Of […]

February 13, 2022

Bait and Switch (Review)

n the mid-nineties, I got fired from a job. The company blamed me to shield their nepotistic connections and even denied my benefits by perjuring themselves in arbitration. It stunned me how petty and retributionist they were. After four months of pointless looking, I found work on a furniture van and decided never to go back to the corporate world. But I had two more interviews to do. And, of course, I got them both (and went with contracting at Nasa). This directly led to my twenty year stint at an international transport company, a job I enjoyed and was […]

February 18, 2022

Ideas (DOG EAR)

‘ve had a lot of experience with short pieces over my life. I’ve written many short stories for various audiences. I’ve reffed a number of RPGs and come up with crazy adventures. I wrote blog and radio pieces for Dr. Sister. And now, for the past ten years, I’ve been blogging twice a week, either my takes on media or on books. That’s a lot of shit to generate. It’s funny how it works. Right now I’ve got a piece I need to put into the NMRA newsletter I edit – something about model railroading. And I can remember walking […]

February 20, 2022

The Invention of Sound (Review)

id you know that psychopaths do not yawn, at least not when you do? And that all those screams you hear in movies – those aren’t the actors themselves but actually come from licensed recordings, used and used and used again, hundreds of times? Chuck Palahniuk, whom you might remember from Fight Club, recently dropped The Invention of Sound onto bookshop shelves. I found my copy in a curbside library (possibly thrust there by a reader with less literary constitution than I have). And I’m going to tell you up straight – The Invention of Sound is one of the […]

February 24, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/23/2022

don’t know why it is. I’m like a symphony conductor who has directed a piece hundreds of times and still feels like he needs to throw up into the tuba section right before the performance commences. I always get uptight before a session, even if it’s only the club. But club ops are a big deal. We have a lot of people who only come out for the ops. And tonight showed why that was. We shined tonight. We had a bunch of guests and a lot of members ready to run. I was actually amazed at the traffic – […]

February 24, 2022

Goliath’s Gun (DOG EAR)

am a fan of Goliath, a show on Amazon. It was a great four-season story about a very shrewd lawyer who lives out of a bottle in a Malibu bar, brought back from the pasture by a case involving is suspicious boating accident. It’s a fun set, with Billy Bob Thornton playing it to the hilt, amicable and shrewd all at once. I loved the line where an apposing corporate attorney tries to bluff him by asking if he’s trying to make a million or so in settlement and Thornton replies, “I’m going to reach up your client’s ass and […]

February 27, 2022

Peril (Review)

ut front with my thoughts, the book is as difficult to read as Old Yeller. But in this case, we’re not seeing the death of an old dog but rather our democracy. Peril, written by Woodward and Costa (two political writers with the chops to drill into this), looks at the final year of the Trump administration, the election, and the first year of Biden’s administration. In that, it reads like a slow car wreck, with Trump poo-pooing the virus, demanding corners to be cut to get it to market before the election, the “steal”, the moaning and carping when […]

February 28, 2022

OpsLog – WAZU – 02/27/2022

o, if we thought we were running a lot of trains in tight confines for the LM&O the other night, we were sadly mistaken. The WAZU (running from Spokane to Portland) was the place to be in Oburg on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Great Guns, but was it a brisk day on the highline! So, since our last shaky session, we saw a number of improvements. First off, Bill’s card system was in full force this time around. This meant that the yards were busy and there were actually a couple of real life locals in place (maybe Bob K […]

March 6, 2022

OpsLog – WVN – 03/05/2022

rinding into Harris Yard after the long ascent up the mountainous grade above Elkview. Rumbling under my metal unadjusted (inside joke) seat is the first of two GP7s (after a mixup at Ashbury left me standing at the ready track, litter rustling around my feet, no engines). Haivng been reassigned these fine units, I did the in-and-out switching on local 252 easily. So now I’m in Harris with a coal train idling next to the unloader track (the crew hunched over their orders) and a red board on the Clifton Forge line, denoting a wesbound arrival. I’ve only got a […]