Blog – Page 201 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 21, 2023

On Sheet – Sound Check

ou know, DCC is a wonderful thing. Now we can drive trains and blink the lights and sound the whistle and bell. I’ve always wondered what those rheostat twisters in the ’50s would have thought of us now with all our digitalized magic. Just the options of not relying on electrical blocks allows us to run helpers and do all sorts of cool things. However, one thing that always bugs me is when, during operations, you see an engineer just driving along, toot-tooting his whistle in patterns only known to him, as cute yet pointless as Thomas the Tank Engine. […]

July 23, 2023

OpsLog – FEC – 7/22/2023

smell something burning.” I was working the out-n-back from Cocoa Yard to Frontenac, fussing over mismarked lading slips, trying to figure out what someone did and didn’t do a couple of weeks back in City Point (without a Rosetta Stone, either). And that’s when I smelled smoke. Engineer Chip was working the lower deck. When I asked him if his engine was on a switch, he told me no. But a car on his train was on a switch, one that had been set against him. And the truck of a wheel delicately placed with love between a rail and […]

July 23, 2023

The Wager (Review)

o this is a first – my wife pushed an age-of-sail book on me for once. And it was very, very good. So the HMS Wager was one the ships in Commodore Anson’s floating boat-wreck of a mission, to round Cape Horn (at the tip of South America) and get into the Spanish Pacific, to loot, burn and steal (i.e. open piracy and murder with the hint of legitimacy that war brings). Easy plan – they’d round the world and be back by tea, right? Well, first, they are hounded by Spanish warships since even Irish children knew this mission […]

July 24, 2023

OpsLog – WAZU – 7/23/2023

don’t think I’ve every run warrants so fast and so long. In three hours, I wrote ninety-three of them. Yes, it was a busy day on the WAZU railroad. Not without goofs, of course. Writing that fast, you can get in trouble. I did clear a train into Spokane when the Lumber Jack run was coming out – a bit of a headlight thing there. But then again, I did have some phenomenal meets. Twice I got five trains past each other at single sidings (by cramming two in tight on the siding while three ran past). Of course, even […]

July 27, 2023

OpsLog – LM&O – 7/26/2023

ormally Frank runs a passenger train with Conductor Greg, but Greg was out of town and Frank looked like a lost puppy for ops night. From the cab of my idling geeps in Martin Yard, I saw him standing in dejection, so I offered him a run on the Zanesville Turn (with work up to Carbon Hill). “It’s not going to be varnish work,” I warned him. “There’s more to switching work than trying not to spill the passengers’ soup.” But he was game. Since we already had a warrant, we were first out of the yard, pressing for Mingo […]

July 27, 2023

Missed Communications (DOG EAR)

hen I was a young lad of twenty or so, I was in a long-distance (i.e. stupid) relationship. To talk to my west coast girl, I had to wait until 11pm Sunday night (8pm her time) to afford the crippling long distance changes. Turns out, in retrospect, I should have just flushed the money down the toilet. Oh well. But what bugs me is the world we live in now. People have phones that can instantly, cheaply connect you with anyone around the planet. Often in coffee shops, I’ll hear young people taking call after call, text after text, fully […]

July 29, 2023

On Sheet – When Things Go Wrong

any of you might remember that incident we had on Tusk Hill (a division of my Tuscarora layout, where we run an English Midlands session rather than a western Pennsylvania one). Here is the disaster report. So the designer/builder Steve (a good friend whose help has been critical in the development of my microlayout) came out to the club (where we keep it) and took a look at it. He checked the obvious possibilities (particularly the solder joints) and after two hours gave up. It would take a lot more work. So he loaded it into his car (yay, microlayouts) […]

August 6, 2023

The Golden Ocean (Review)

atrick O’Brian was a big deal back in the nineties with his Aubrey/Maturin books. Anyway, he was so hot that they scraped the bottom of the barrel for anything else he’d produced. It’s not to say that The Golden Ocean was bad – it was just forty years old at that point. And really, it’s pretty good. The novel follows a young Irish lad, Peter Palafox, who has gotten himself a berth on Commodore Anson’s flagship of his risky round-the-world, loot-everything-Spanish expedition (which I read about in The Wager, which reminded me I had these somewhere at stack-bottom). It’s a […]

August 11, 2023

A Friendly Challenge (DOG EAR)

nteresting thing happened to me today. I finally got signed up (I hope) for Medicare. It took four hours (and two help calls) to get this done. I was dragging by the time I finished. To celebrate, I grabbed the wife and our books and we headed over to our favorite Orlando coffee house, Framework. When we came in, there is one barista guy I always chat with for a bit. Today when we came in, he said, “It’s my favorite customers”. When I tried to downplay it, he responded that I always have something interesting to chat about, and […]

August 11, 2023

On Sheet – Club Duties

very kid (and the kids in us) dream of advancing a throttle and running a mile-long train out of a yard, leaning out of that cab window and calling the signals, checking the flimsies and feeling the wind howl around our weather-beaten head. Nobody dreams of working the hostler job, keeping the boiler pressures up over the long cold night. Or clerking, typing waybills and train orders up. Or walking the track, checking the line. Or walking through the cars punching tickets. There are things that support those god-like engineers that just isn’t fun. Same goes true for being in […]