Blog – Page 243 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 15, 2026

With the Slack, That Will Do, and other railroad stories (Review)

‘m not an engineer or dispatcher; I play them at my model train club. Like factory work, like small shops, the modern world has pushed railroad engineering from its glory days into an un-fun, by-the-book, management-conflicting job (like everything else). I know that from my computer programming career – I went from doing entire projects freehand down to daily reporting and dull methodologies in the span of my forty years. And, like Charles H. Geletzke Jr, I’m glad I was there for the waning days of it, and now I’m glad I’m out. But enough about our world. The author […]

February 15, 2026

OpsLog – WVN – 2/14/2026

o here it is… Butt Monkey (noun) 1. An annoying and irksome person. 2. An object of abuse and ridicule. And on the Saint Valentines Day Massacre running of the West Virginia Northern, I got to be the session’s Butt Monkey. I’m not sure how this happened. Hey, in my years of blogging ops sessions, I’ve written about plenty of hapless butt monkeys, people who barge about in sessions, cluelessly delay others, lose their tempers or tell long-winded stories while I’m trying to mentally work out my switch moves. Some are such monkeys (either by personality or inability) that I […]

February 22, 2026

Day Zero (Review)

icked this up at a used bookstore in Norfolk on my sister’s store credit (which I cleared out). The cover is interesting – a young boy and some sort of ratty tiger robot looking out over ruined skyscrapers. So when she asked if she could borrow it from me, I pretty much had to agree. But she only got about halfway through before dropping it (she drops easier than I do). “Wasn’t for me,” she explained. So C. Robert Cargill’s novel, Zero Day, is a story about a young boy and his nanny robot that looks like a tiger, who suddenly […]

February 22, 2026

OpsLog – LM&O (TT&TO) – 2-21-2026

n high craggy mountains lost in the mists of the grim Borderlands, old wizards practice the dark arts of Time Table & Train Order operations, demanding times of 1:1 (and perhaps slower), of steadfast observance of their Book of Lore (The Condensed Code of Operating Rules) and archaic rites to deny access of acolytes not established in their order. Their membership is secret, excursive and, frankly, dying. At a beat-up cinder block building in the rundown edge of Stupidville, a youngish group assembles to try TT&TO our way, with the clock buzzing at 8:1, with a lot of guys who aren’t quite […]

February 26, 2026

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/25/2026

ears ago, my father passed away at 4am at a local hospital. By 9am that morning, I was writing his obituary. “You’re the writer,” my family told me. Yes, so it’s a bit like that. It was a very stormy night on the railroad last night. Tempers high, expectations low, waits long, and on improperly aligned turnouts – shorts. There are a number of issues we had – most of them you know, some of them I don’t know, but yeah, let’s debrief it from my point of view. The dispatcher had a number of issues. First off: the east […]

March 1, 2026

The Warrior (Review)

he Warrior is a David Drake novel, following along in the tank tracks (not correct, since they are hovertanks) of the feared and respected Hammers Slammers, a mercenary tank battalion in the far future. I’ve mentioned a couple of novels from this series, including the titular Hammers Slammers. The thing is, the author is a combat veteran and it shows in the novels. People don’t question, don’t ponder life’s strange events, they simply act. And the tanks they act in are the largest and most dangerous machines in the galaxy. As witness in the three short stories that make up the central […]

March 1, 2026

OpsLog – OSMR – 2/28/2026

e picked up an invite from our sister (half-sister, given it’s “half-O”) clubs, the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders, for an ops session. They still want to learn from us (which is odd, given the hash we made of our last session). But no, an open invite, and I was pleased at our turnout – we were (just looking) half the crews. We had myself, Kyle, Phil, Terry (in club grays, looking so team-spirited), Mike (in club-heritage black) and Pete (in some sort of black shirt I think he got off a dead ninja (I’m assuming that Friday night at […]

March 5, 2026

LilySmash (Dog Ear)

ll I can say is that my anime shirts introduce me to a lot of young people. I got me talking to the baristas at Framework (Mattie, Mars, and the rest). And it introduced us to Lily. She’s a young artist (everyone looks young to me, but not every artist looks like an artist). She works in an undisclosed restaurant that the wife and I go to after the Zen sit. She’s a perky little thing and makes me feel old just talking to her, but she’s trying to find a way out of food services and into art. She’s tried […]

March 8, 2026

When the Moon Hits your Eye (Review)

ong time John Scalzi fan, from Old Man’s War to Redshirts to Starter Villain. So when my best friend (and fellow Scalzi fan) told me about this book, I had to immediately say… “What?” Okay, so stay with me. One day, for reasons not given or even hinted, the moon changes… to cheese. It is first noticed in various museums and lunar rock storage areas, where now all they have are lumps of cheese. But it is quickly noticed in the sky – so as not to throw off the tides and wreck havoc, the moon is much bigger (since the mass of cheese […]

March 8, 2026

OpsLog – Tusk Valley – 3/7/2026

club buddy of mine, Pete, mentioned he’d be out at the clubhouse on Saturday, just a casual hang-out deal. Figured I’d run Tuscarora solo – he just wanted to putter about the main line on the club layout. Fine – I’ve run solo before. But then a new member of the club – young Zach, named so as not to be confused with President Zach – asked if he could try it. He’s just starting out, has a small place, and wants to see how micro ops work. Sure, why not. Of course, I always invite guests to run their […]