Blog – Page 205 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 18, 2023

OpsLog – La Mesa – 10/15/2023

e were sitting in our uber on Park Boulevard in Balboa Park, looking to our left. “What the crispy crap…?” There is an endless scarlet flood streaming past, agitated and churning. Lava? No, it’s a breast cancer awareness march. And our event is on the other side of it. “We’ll get out here,” Steve tells the driver. And if there is one moment I’ll always remember, it’s Steve Hooper, man’s man, pushing through a sea of pink tutus. What a crazy start to the day. But we’re here to run trains, right? Having learned a lesson yesterday, I stuck tight […]

October 19, 2023

Drug addict (DOG EAR)

his is a sad story. Recently I was at the La Mesa Club housed in the San Diego Model Railroad museum. I was there for one of their operations events, where they run their massive layout under 1950s methods, with written orders and manned stations. It’s not for the faint of heart or the impatient of mind – you can wait for hours and hours for a train, or even find yourself standing in a siding for an eternity. Also, I get cell phones and why they are so cool and convenient to have. My friend I went out there […]

October 20, 2023

On Sheet – Train Order Boards Revisited

don’t want to get into all the details. Recently, when attending a huge TT&TO session at the La Mesa Model Railroad club in San Diego, I thought I saw a train order board being misused. Later, while hanging out at another station with an old SP guy running it, I mentioned the “mistake” I’d witnessed. Turns out, as he explained it, I was wrong. Great, and I’ve written multiple blogs and given two clinics (as well as did it on my Tuscarora) incorrectly. So I’ll correct it now. Train order signals (as shown in the photo to the right) tell […]

October 22, 2023

OpsLog – FEC – 10/21/2023

ot home after a long late drive from the east coast to find, on the aptly-named “Discord”, that my friends who also attended the Farnhams’ FEC session were chortling about long waits. Really? I was on the big green panel that day and, in all honesty, I was playing it like a virtuoso on a grand piano (just saying). We started out late because of a pre-session chat. Once I took my seat and the clock started, I was looking at four trains on the layout and two holding in the wings of staging, waiting to come out. In short […]

October 22, 2023

The Unknown Shore (Review)

his is the second of a two-book set, which began in The Golden Ocean. As you remember, this all settles around the mission (in reality) of Commodore Anston who attempted to sail a small ill-equipped, manned and supplied squadron around the tip of South America, facing a month of storms, scurvy, and death. Even when they did get into the Pacific ocean, there was very little of the planned raiding of Spanish possessions (read that as “none”). No, they wandered west, looking for the Manila Galleon (which they desperately defeated). All the English sailors went home immensely rich. All except […]

October 26, 2023

OpsLog – LM&O – 10/25/2023

y the time the session was over, and then the hour debrief by the hard-core hoggers done, the lights off, alarm set, and the slow drive home, after all that, I sat on my sofa and watched something dumb on the tube and drank a beer. I mean, insert your expletive, but what a session. The club came together Wednesday night for a big monthly ops session. We were going to try the racks and stacks again after the chaos of last time (with trains going to the wrong way and one intermodal being attacked by the mole people in […]

October 27, 2023

On Sheet – The Booby Prize

y Jewish grandmother once told me something (for the record, she really isn’t my biological grandmother but we’ve shared a close friendship for forty years). She said, simply, that Knowledge is the Booby Prize. It took me a number of years to understand what she meant by that. But as I get older, many of her observations become ever truer. Recently our club had the biggest operation session to date, detailed HERE. As noted, I had more trains than I knew what do do with. At one point I was just fleeting them over the summit, collecting them at the […]

October 29, 2023

Artificial Condition (Review)

‘m going to have to go with different tastes here. My sister really liked Martha Wells The Murderbot Diaries. She even reviewed it HERE. So when I was in the used book store I saw one of the series, Artificial Condition, there on the shelf. So yes, I felt duty-bound to pick a copy up and peruse it. It was okay, but it didn’t rock my world. The rough idea is that is a security bot who was involved in a crime where the crew for an entire mine-site was murdered. Having seen some of it and having deactivated his own […]

October 30, 2023

AirLog – 10/29/2023

kay, model railroading has brought me a lot of things. It brought me together with my dad (which, besides reading and old movies, was pretty much all we had). It brought me Orlando N-Trak Club, to which I’ve been a member for thirty-five years. It’s brought me some close friends (and, well, some interesting people). And it’s gotten me into some interesting operational layouts, from La Mesa in San Diego to Steve King’s old Chicago layout to massive weekend sessions in St Paul, Asheville, and Atlanta. And it’s got me as a fixture in various railroads across the state: The […]

November 2, 2023

Memories (DOG EAR)

ad a waking dream today. Woke up remembering a small game store in Cincinnati I went to in the mid-seventies. Small little shop on a twisty downtown street. My friends would pile into my old VW and rattle down there. In the packed shop with its game-stuffed shelves, little Marilyn (how we all had crushes on her) would talk about the latest games (and old favorites still in circulation). I’d nearly forgotten all about that. It’s strange, these little shops that the internet has rolled over. I remember when there were three hobby shops within two miles of my Orlando […]