Blog – Page 212 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 16, 2024

On Sheet – Mirror image

ne thing about railroading, there are always new things to learn. For example, I remember reading in a rulebook where a switchman, after aligning a turnout to the main, must stand on the opposite side of the track from the stand. I read that and was puzzled. Why such a rule? Finally someone answered it for me – there was apparently some horrible wreck that occurred somewhere when a brakeman aligned a switch to the main for an oncoming train. At the very last second, he got confused, was certain it was misaligned, and he threw it point-blank in front […]

February 19, 2024

Destroyermen 8: Storm Surge (Review)

eesh. So here we are on book eight of this series. The world (and cast of characters) keeps expanding with the realization of the existence of a new race (South Africa), mounted riders led by (of all things) a Czech (in Northern India) and a crazy change to our world over in the Dominion area (over in South America). So we resolve India and the double stalemate there (and nobody seems happy about it), our wonder weapons – those P-40s – finally get deployed (that was fun). And the crazy Silva gets to break more things (as he is prone […]

February 22, 2024

Politics (DOG EAR)

very now and then while scrolling FaceBook, I’ll find an old Calvin and Hobbs strip. I’ll generally pause and enjoy it (which is probably why the FaceBook AI bots send me more of them (creepy)). I like the fresh art and the humor of a child who, like Dennis the Menace, is out of control. It ended after ten years when creator Bill Watterson decided he’d said all he could and couldn’t work with the compression of comics in dying newspapers. I can respect him for this. Recently a Dilbert group showed up, complete with a weird cartoon that didn’t make […]

February 25, 2024

Butcher & Blackbird (Review)

ooookay. So this was a weird one. I was talking books with a surgery-follow-up doctor and I asked for a recommendation (as a reader, it is the most precious gift I can grant another reader). This female doc was listening to this book on audible and really liked it. You be the judge. So Butcher & Blackbird is chick-lit at its most extreme. The two characters (kinda from the title, but properly named Sloane and Rowan) are both serial killers. To make them sympathetic, their victims are the lowest of society – other serial killers if they can, drug dealers […]

February 26, 2024

OpsLog – TBL – 2/25/2024

uscarora has been inoperative for two months now. The interlocking started fritzing; I got the last good interlocking session on 12/30/2023 (Happy New Year!) and then a massive failure in a status run (1/21, aborted). So my electrical engineer reworked the cheater box so that I could run only turnouts, no interlocking effort. And that’s a pity, because that’s where the pike shines. Still, a basic session is better than no session and so my friend Greg came over for the day and we ran the way we did years back; a coal guy, a local guy and a lot […]

February 29, 2024

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/28/2024

ake a moment to put it into perspective. The famous La Mesa club at San Diego has op sessions on their two-story (not two level, two story) HO railroad. It’s 25 scale mile s long, runs 16 scheduled trains and maybe the same number of extras (so about 30 trains total). They host this with 30 to 40 engineers. They manage a 25 hour session 4 times a year. Orlando N-Trak runs its sizable N-scale layout with 15 miles of mainline, runs 25 scheduled trains and a possible couple of extras. We run with 25 people, hosting a 2.5 hour […]

March 3, 2024

Extra South (Review)

ne of the things that stuck with me in the movie The Flim Flam man (set in the “old South” at the end of the fifties) was the railroads. You saw L&N, Southern, and even Monon trains doing their small-town switching in their rural ways. I was reminded of it in Extra South, a wonderful book by author H. Reid. Here he focuses (in anecdote and pictures) of what the mid-to-late century was like on the sleepy lines of the South. From sugar cane railroads to tiny branch lines, even the railroad that went to Virginia Tech (my Alma mater, served […]

March 3, 2024

OpsLog – C&A – 2/27/2024

rouped all my errands down the east coast of Florida into a big pile so I could work them all in one day. And one of these was a visit to Mark Svendsen’s Chicago & Alton Railroad. This one was a tidy little HO layout in a small room over a garage, perfect for two-man operations (well, with John Ligda and myself there, it was three-men, ourselves and host John pulling his hair out at our operational inefficiencies (yeah, I like using those bells and whistles). In truth, this line shows that you can squeeze all sorts of layout operations […]

March 7, 2024

Future Nostalgia (DOG EAR)

ne of the popular methods of making distant future scifi relatable to us in the present day is to adorn the stories with items that relate to our world. The idea is that our present is carried into this future, to make us more curious. After all, there is our time carried forward for our amusement. Some examples. The Rocinante – This is the space ship in the wonderful Expanse series. It is the name of Don Quixote’s broken-down mount, and sorta hints that the heroes of that series consider themselves misguided in their various quests. Also, in one part, […]

March 8, 2024

On Sheet – Advice (Part 1)

kay, I’m a firm sixty-five years old. Been in the hobby since I was five. Been in the club for thirty-five years and running ops on the layout (the original dispatcher) for twenty-five years. Yeah, I’m a fixture. We just picked up a new kid, looks like mid-twenties. He knows it all and makes comments about the other members openly (pretty ballsy, given that he’s been in the club for three weeks). But the real ass-chapper came last week during ops. Was at the panel (as I usually am). This railroad now runs on high volume – in this evening, […]