Blog

September 16, 2022

On Sheet – Famous Quotes

n this edition of On Sheet, I’d like to list some of the best quotes I’ve heard during my years of operating on model railroads across the United States. While putting together this collection, I found myself smiling. Let’s see if I can give you a smile with some of these… “That’s why they put windows on the front of engines.” – At the club years ago, I remember an engineer running over an incorrect turnout, derailing, and complaining he hadn’t noticed the alignment. This was an overheard response. “Did you even read the orders you issued?” – In the […]
September 18, 2022

Persephone Station (Review)

n interesting idea for a book, a feminized version of The Magnificent Seven set in a scifi space opera. But instead of poor Japanese peasants or poor Mexican farmers, this time it’s an unknown alien culture that is hidden away in a planet where the only spaceport is surrounded by poisonous plants and dangerous animals, artificially placed by the indigenous race to contain the humans. But even as I write this, it feels awfully thin – nobody ever dropped so much as a probe elsewhere to confirm if the rest of the planet is such a hellhole? And the aliens […]
September 19, 2022

OpsLog – TY&E – 9/18/2022

aybreak is just coming up over the low eastern hills. I’m sitting in my TY&E Yellow Perils, idling at in the weedy lot of the Raymond industries, my cut filled with full sand hoppers and empty log cars. The good thing about this is it means I’ll have a semi-loaded train going each way. By organizing the cuts, I can make the ride a lot easier. After all, I’ve done this job forever. While I’m sitting there, some do-gooder track walker comes over, shoots me a withering glance and throws the industrial turnout in front of me to normalized routing. […]
September 22, 2022

Taciturn (DOG EAR)

here are two ways you can be introduced to a character, the real-world way or the accepted western literary way. So say you are in a western bar. In walks a cowboy. In the real-world way, he will likely sit down next to you and start to chat (since bars are social gathering places and if you wanted to drink alone in your sulk, you’d buy a bottle and sit with your horse in the stable). Anyway, this hypothetical cowboy would chat with you, perhaps telling you where he was born, and what ranches he worked on. Possibly if he’d […]
September 23, 2022

On Sheet – Sliver Linings

n our last On Sheet, I just hung out with you all and laughed about some of the funny things I’ve heard during operations. Well, a lot of people liked it and some people discussed aspects of it, but I did get one contact that said that it actually was counter-productive, and that that person might not be so keen to operate if that’s what it was about. Ouch! Classic backfire! So let’s take a step back, way back, and define model train operations. How about this? Model Train Operations are the biggest, greatest co-operative game there is! And that’s […]
September 25, 2022

OpsLog – FEC – 9/24/2022

o it was a strange day on the east coast of Florida. I reported to my FEC tower outside Hialeah Yard for my shift dispatching the FEC. Oddly, the planet Earth was in a wobbling orbit – the sun was up and bright at 4am. The resulting disturbances to the ionosphere crashed all radio efforts. But we had a railroad to run and, by God, we were going to run it. Note of explanation – the room lights were wonky and the radiophones had crashed. The superintendent was pulling his hair to get us into a position to go hot, […]
September 25, 2022

A Guide for Working Breeds (Review)

hort story this time (since I’m deep in a World War 2 fictionalization right now), located in The Year’s Best Science Fictions Volume 2 (and Volume 1 brought me so much enjoyment). First story in the set, A Guide for Working Breeds by Vina Jie-Min Prasad, was a crazy begining. This tale does a great job of unconventional storytelling – specifically email exchanges and purchases between a couple of robots. We have Kleekai Greyhound (K.g1- 09030) who has just come online and has been assigned a mentor bot – namely Constant Killer (C.k2-00425). The exchanges are funny and help define […]
September 27, 2022

OpsLog – TBL – 09/26/2022

ay what you will about model train ops being stressful, frustrating, and unfun. Whatever. I had to go to the club today to meet an AC repair guy and since Ian is going to blow away our Wednesday night club ops, I had nothing better to do. So I figured I’d run a Monday afternoon session on the Tuscarora Branch Line with just myself. My friend Greg wants to get better at the interlocking position so he agreed to come as well. So after the AC guy recharged our system and dumped a bill on us, we started the clock […]
September 30, 2022

On Sheet – Room for Improvements

ne thing about model railroad operations – you don’t have to get it right on the first try. Nobody can say exactly how something is going to work until they do it. When managing a model pike, you’ll find yourself changing things, cutting in turnouts or altering your schedule. You set something up, maybe it works, maybe it doesn’t. If the latter is true, you try something different. In my Tuscarora Branch Line, I thought I wanted to run a train order board so that special orders could be “hooped up” (i.e. physically passed) to the engineers. For this, you […]
October 2, 2022

The Rising Tide (Review)

guess I’ve been in a World War Two mindset these days. Saw Jeff Shaara’s The Rising Tide in one of those curbside libraries and it caught my eye. I’ve never read any of Shaara’s books and even though this is book one of three (and since it’s a used book, it’s doubtful I’ll stumble over the other two like this), I decided to give it a try. So The Rising Tide has an interesting premise – the author fictionalizes history just a bit, telling the stories of WW2 from the battles in North Africa to the Torch invasion to Sicily […]