Blog – Page 241 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

December 21, 2025

The Demon-Haunted World (Review)

ince I haunt flat-earther and young creation groups on Facebook (debunking various silly opinions on occasion) I thought I’d enjoy Carl Sagan’s The Demon-Haunted World, And why not? Sagan wrote this in the mid-nineties and is a noted science advocate, using his background to guide and instruct those are less-inclined to it. Yes, that’s what I wanted to do. My problem is that the book just didn’t agree with me. Perhaps it was the small print or the long routes he too on some of his points, perhaps readers and writers sometimes don’t click. Don’t know. But my rate of […]

December 21, 2025

OpsLog – FEC – 12/21/2025

t’s getting into the holidays, people are traveling, holding parties and such, so scraping up a session is getting difficult. As it was, the December 20th running of the Farnham’s Florida East Coast was a close-run thing. He got just enough people to run a casual session together – no dispatcher, sorta TT&TO style. The day was nice, we opened the doors and went to work. My first run was 930, the busy Titusville out-n-back. I really had a good time with this one – it was very overloaded (the Nehi bottling plant had a occupied dock and four cars […]

December 22, 2025

OpsLog – WAZU – 12/21/2025

his fine day started in the crew beanery where we were served Louisiana dishes (I think it was gumbo and something else that looked like gumbo, a roadkill mix of good eatin’. Why we were eating southern in preparation for an Oregon run, I’ve no idea. But it’s good eating, far better than anyone (save Rob Gross) serves up (the Tuscarora? Two packages of sugar-free cookies). For all my snark, I did snark down too much, feeling bloated all session. Should have brought that up in the debrief. So Zach was dispatcher and I was running road. I did have […]

January 1, 2026

The Best of 2025 (DOG EAR)

ime again for my review of books I really enjoyed for 2025. Of course, these aren’t all published this year – there is no statue of limitations on books you might discover. For example, The War of the Wenuses was a random discovered off a YouTube video which was published some century and a quarter ago. It was a lampoon of War of the Worlds and really made me laugh. However, most of you (not being addicts of the original) would not understand the lampooning that takes place in it – since it was right on the edge of getting the nomination, I […]

January 1, 2026

OpsLog – TBL – 12/31/2025

es, so this is it, my last session for 2025 (unless someone calls in the next few minutes and I’m grabbing my throttle bag and running for the car). Anyway, I thought about going over to the clubhouse and running a quick session by myself. But I opened the invitation up – looks like everyone else was busy and I got one guy – Shemp. But that’s fine. This is the thing. This year, I ran in room-packer club sessions with 30+ people all working in tight harmony to get through the simulated day. I ran on structured layouts that […]

January 4, 2026

Wizenbeak (Review)

hen the novel Wizenbeak came out, you’d probably walk into any mall, look through the one or two bookstores housed there, go to the fantasy section which was greater than the current Barnes and Noble, pick through the many selections and buy it (likely with cash). That’s a period piece of when this book was released (1986, currently forty years ago). Well, most books either come from Massive Amazon, pathetic B&N, or, in this case, a used bookstore. But enough of that. The titular character of this book is a wizard, complete with a troll-bat, who wishes to use his own water […]

January 12, 2026

OpsLog – VSW – 1/8/2026

convention was held in Cocoa this weekend – Protorails. While I couldn’t attend (I had a train show to manage in Deland over the weekend) I picked up a dispatcher request for two railroads hosting sessions for the con, both on the same day. So the first was the Virginia Southwestern, John Wilke’s fabulous coal hauler. And since it’s a dual line with shared trackage, I was able to weasel a second free pass for Zeus H, a young dispatcher I’ve sessioned with in the past. The only problem here was that he got stuck in the Amsterdam snow disaster […]

January 12, 2026

OpsLog – P&WV – 1/8/2026

o this is evening session of Zeus and my two-for-Thursday operations marathon. After finishing up wrecking the Virginia Southwestern, we raced up I-4 to get to Tom Wilson and our session on his Pittsburgh & West Virginia. This is a coal-hauling, steel-making layout with a heavily-traveled main line and long branch up to Mifflin and Clariton, all serving a gigantic mill complex. We were the first to arrive – found host Tom trying to string intercom cables like a sapper under artillery fire. When we couldn’t get it to work, I told him to just seat me at a tiny […]

January 13, 2026

ShowLog – Deland – 1/(10-11)/2026

ur report actually begins a day earlier. Our club has recently dipped our rail joiners into T-Trak. It’s very easy and popular (and a hell of a lot simpler than them wooden Trojan horses we built in our N-Trak days). So the evening pre-show, Shannon and Zeus (two n-trak knuckleheads) were out at the fairgrounds setting up. It went together pretty easy (even though there was a case of elevated curves being installed backwards, turning them into escape-velocity curves). But the new layout was pretty much up and running in time for the show. That being said, the show went […]

January 18, 2026

OpsLog – OSMR – 1/17/2026

ears back, I used to ride by bike over to Dick Sturm’s house to either work on his layout or run ops. It wasn’t a long ride, about two miles if that, but it was nice to ride home on cold winter nights after playing with trains. Anyway, wiggled an invite with the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders for a Saturday session and decided to ride over – this time the ride was seven and change, with the worst part on their end (a quarter mile on Aloma sidewalks, with all sorts of traffic. Anyway, made it there safely and they […]