Blog – Page 191 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

January 29, 2023

The Lion and the Unicorn (Review)

o yes, I’ll bet you are thinking this will be another Nine Princes in Amber reviews with a title like this.No, I’m back to reading the Ark Royal series, where the humans (as of this book, the fifteenth of the series) are fighting a virus that has the human fleet against the wall, and seemingly will not stop until all of humanity are its wretched, brainless slaves. And this book is probably one of the best of the lot, since the original Ark Royal. In seeking new weapons systems, the designer on Earth have come up with an interesting idea. […]

February 1, 2023

OpsLog – TBL – 1/31/2023

t was a special Tuesday Night session of the Tuscarora Branch Line. Things will be busy for a couple of weeks and since the last session went so well, I wanted to try some new things. We had many changes and many failures. First off, I mentioned on another blog retrofitting an old Rapido Pacific Fruit Express car I’d had for ages. Nice car, 1920s vintage, good detail. However, the coupler was mounted on a fixed shaft so there was no way to just swap trucks. Instead, I sawed off the couplers and body-mounted a new set. Turns out my […]

February 2, 2023

Sign Language (DOG EAR)

ometimes I’ll craft a word up whose meaning is obvious. And sometimes someone will tell me it isn’t a “real word”. To that, I explain, “If you know what I meant and what I communicated to you, then it serves as a ‘real word’. Information was communicated.” Noticed it today while driving the wife to breakfast. In our little neighborhood in Orlando, originally Virginia was a neighborhood street. Sometime along the way, the city sacrificed about a hundred front lawns and made it four lanes (me, I think if you want to live way outside of town, you should deal […]

February 2, 2023

OpsLog – CSX Taft – 2/2/2023

et my friend Chris Strecker for an early morning breakfast, followed by an invite to his house to try operations on his blossoming layout, a simulation of car spotting in Taft Yard in Orlando, Florida (yeah, right down the road). His layout is one of those elegant small layouts (where you aren’t throwing track across a basement). Basically it’s a dogbone with two staging tracks on the back wall and a host of industries along the leading edge. Chris has actually placed a number of real places on his line (and a couple of fictitious ones at well (and who […]

February 3, 2023

On Sheet – It’s about time!

uestion: Why is there time and space? There is time so that everything doesn’t happen at once, and there is space so that everything doesn’t happen to you. When it comes to time, fast-time in model railroads get a bit of a bum rap. People think that the sole purpose of a fast clock is to generate all sorts of undue stress, like speeding up a production line to make the workers produce more. Poppycock. Time (and fast-time) is nothing more than a measure of where we are at in the operations sequence. If there is stress all around, that’s […]

February 5, 2023

OpsLog – WVN – 2/4/2023

think there is a trope forming, that for some reason everyone I attempt to carpool with suffers a medical episode. This time, got a call from the ER the night before, my co-ride bowing out. Come on, how dangerous are heart flutters in the grand scheme of things, you big baby! I mean, we’re talking operations on the West Virginia Northern! So, flying solo, I made my way out there. We were a bit short (with an additional cancellation), with Hostess Gail doubling up on yard jobs (“Thankee, no,” I thought). Instead, I got to run some really nice rolls, […]

February 5, 2023

The Courts of Chaos (Review)

nd here it is, the conclusion to the original Amber series, written in the 1970s, read by me in the early 1980s, carted about from place to place by me for forty years and eventually reread. The end! So, we have the world (bigger, reality itself) falling apart, an evil brother revealed and on the loose, and hero Corwin riding hard to reach the Courts of Chaos (basically, the Castle at the End of the Universe) to save things. Very exciting and very interesting. Of course, these days some readers might think of Corwin as “woke” (in that he attempts […]

February 6, 2023

OpsLog – NH – 2023/2/5

elp, they were predicting cold and rain, meteors and crust-cracking. But it turned out to be a beautiful day to run on the New Haven’s Highland Line. With the garage door open, we operated in pleasant outdoor conditions. Since it’s been a while, that worked in our favor since there was a rolling Q&A session on the driveway with host Rob Gross before the ball dropped (even your kindly reporter/dispatcher looked over a control panel that, at first, looked incomprehensible (add a few facing point locks and I’d just run screaming across the lawn)). But everyone got their paperwork, throttles, […]

February 9, 2023

Untold Stories (DOG EAR)

love finding the irony of events around me and composing a story around them. And I love good stories, where things happen and there is a humorous/moralistic/ironical meaning to them. I’m not keen on the “why I was great and everyone else is an idiot” stories – usually these involve straw men and simplistic one-upsmanship that serves no purpose outside of self-gratulation. However, every so often a story comes up that I’m reluctant to share. Often it will hurt the other person by telling it (even though, if it involves me or takes place around me, I’ll consider it public […]

February 10, 2023

On Sheet – Duties of the guest

veryone always talks about how to set up an op session, and what you need to do as a host. But what about the duties of each and every operator? I wouldn’t have even considered these points if I hadn’t been at sessions where they occurred. Be on time: It is critical to be on time for a session. Jobs are being assigned and the host needs to know where he can put valuable operators. Worse, coming in late means that you are now a major disruption to the flow of the pike. If you are honestly running late because […]