Blog – Page 182 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

August 12, 2022

On Sheet – IDing the Perp

ne of those problems you might face on your first op session is where everything is, industry-wise. Sure, your waybills/switchlists/tabs might dictate that a car be dropped at Amalgamated Antimatter but it’s one of a dozen industries on your pike. How do your newbie crews find it? Well, there are many ways you can do this, all of them with pros and cons. Written Instructions: Sure, you can provide documentation for your operations, but generally one operator in ten will read them (and that’s only if he’s bored). Obvious Building Functionality: A fuel distributor and a stock pen are pretty […]

August 14, 2022

OpsLog – FEC – 08/13/2022

keep telling myself that I need to write a fun piece about the Florida East Coast where we ran operations today. But the owner/dispatcher looked exhausted after the session – he’d not dispatched in over a year. On the line we had ten operators from Orlando N-Trak, and even with our skills on the LM&O under warrants, this was an away game and the first time for these guys. The room was tight, nobody knew where anything was and how to do anything, and at one point the rain was hitting so hard I felt like we were going to […]

August 14, 2022

The Cruel Stars (Review)

eah, yeah, I know, ANOTHER Ark Royal book, this the eleventh in the set. And for The Cruel Stars, we go back to author Christopher Nuttall’s favorite moment in his history, the desperate First Interstellar War between the humans and the Tadpoles, where humans were only just hanging on against a foe with slightly better tech, one that had studied us and played us and destroyed our joint fleet off New Russia. So now the humans are struggling to find ships and manpower to replace their grievous loses. This book tells us one of their many attempts, and this one […]

August 18, 2022

Retraction on AnyImage (DOG EAR)

ell, this is embarrassing. Last week I gushed about AnyImage, which was software you could use to embed your website with an image neatly into Facebook (which has become a Metapain). Sure, it worked great the first few times I used it. Liked it enough that I used it to post a DOG EAR piece promoting it. However, the day I went to post up that praise, the site asked for me to register (because I’d used it two or three times and they wanted me to sign up). Look, I prefer it free and clear, but if I need […]

August 19, 2022

On Sheet – Cork it

was at a local session a friend was hosting a while ago. And yes, I agree that model railroading can be, at times, frustrating. One of our members was having problems backing a cut into a siding – had a couple of derailments (and guess what – if you are in N-scale, get used to it). But he wouldn’t suffer in silence, no. He crabbed and carped in his frustration. I looked around and the host was catching every word. Told my buddy (as politely as I could) to cool it a bit. I guess nobody takes my advance. A […]

August 21, 2022

The Art of War (Review)

his book is actually two books in one. First off, there is the codification of rules and strategies of war, from the basic (don’t attack uphill) to the abstract (don’t be guided by anger). In this first half, we get the transcribed words of Su-Tzu (or someone else, or even a collections of someone elses) from the sixth century BC, listing his principles of warfare. I decided to have a read of it when a scifi story I read made open mention of the Art, but not by name (I guessed it correctly, through). So the first half are the […]

August 25, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 08/24/2022

n the bad side, there were a number of near collisions, several (that I knew of/experienced) LAP orders, some running without paper, a lot of phones clutched to numb ears, a big boo-boo in the yard, and a passenger train that ran a half-day late. Okay. But on the good side, we did run all the freights, all the locals, all the coal and ore, and got to experiment with delivering cars to the Nazareth turn (well, now we know what doesn’t work). We started a little earlier and had a lot more people working throttles at the end. Everyone […]

August 25, 2022

Recommendation (DOG EAR)

have a peach of a physical therapist. In the weeks following my surgery, she’d been the one outlining my exercise program, making me stretch and flex and hurt and get better. A lot of my recovery, I owe to her. She’s from Brazil and we’ve chatted about life there, life here, all that. One cool down following a rough session, we got to talking about books (I always bring a new one every week for the waiting room). Anyway, she told me she loved a Brazilian author named Paulo Coelho, who I’ve never heard of. She told me she’s read […]

August 26, 2022

On Sheet – The Straight and Narrow

p front, I’ll admit that railroads made most towns. The rails would come through, the depot would be built, and then “Railroad Avenue” would parallel the line. The town grid would firm up off this, buildings in line with track, everything lain down as if on graph paper. Historically accurate? Sure. Interesting? Um…. Too often, small railroaders with limited space instinctively snap their sectional track on a bead two to three inches from the forward edge. And their town naturally follows, with ninety degree corners in the streets, everything placed to parallel the sides of the layout’s edge with geometric […]

August 28, 2022

OpsLog – FEC – 8/27/2022

‘ve been waiting to run on the Florida East Coast since forever. Well, since two weeks ago. Yes, that is when our club ran this line, as reported HERE. But yes, I wanted to run again. So we drove all the way to Palm Bay, met with people, I trained a new dispatcher, then my wife took me aside and told me her sister (who she was with on Wednesday) phoned her with the news she is positive with Covid. Da fug? We had this conference on the host’s front porch. Going back inside (with masks now on) we confessed […]