Blog – Page 84 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 17, 2015

OpsLog – FEC – 10/17/2015

ot much to write about when a session goes as well as this one. The trains were running ahead of schedule. Nobody I saw plugged the main. The new card forwarding system worked well. Oh, there was a broken coupler and a sticking wheel and a couple of derailments, but that’s model railroading. Good for all attending, but not good for blogging. Blood on the tracks – that’s what brings in the eyeballs. Still, I can tell you that being part of a spotless session can be a lot of fun. I was rolling into Palm Bay in the seat […]

October 18, 2015

And all the Earth is a Grave (Review)

ute little story this time, out of the 40’s or 50’s, again, a Gutenberg find. It’s a little scifi story about a tiny mistake in, of all things, a coffin factory. Seems that a computer slipped a bit and suddenly their stodgy production orders are boosted. The marketing director, seeing what’s coming (and finding all sorts of money in his department because of the glitch) blasts an advertising campaign out, creating a marketing feedback loop where demand fuels supply fuels demand fuels supply and so on. It’s a humorous look at super marketing (something I did in my own Early […]

October 22, 2015

Past and Future (DOG EAR)

kay, everyone who reads (and only true readers find their way down to these dusty vaults) sees those things on Facebook – “How many of these classics have you read?” “The top 100 science fiction books”. In short, pretentious rubbish. If you are a reader, you read everything. Not just cowboy novels, not just scifi, not just detective or manly-hero or any of that other stuff – you read across the fields, taking in this and that and never hesitant to try anything new (or loaned). I wasn’t even thinking this was we walked over to Juniors, the little diner […]

October 24, 2015

OpsLog – SR – 10/22/2015

kay, so we’re up in Asheville for a model railroad operations weekend, running on a layout that’s modeling… Asheville. Our first run on the weekend (after a marathon crazy ten hour drive to get here) was Wally Brown’s Southern Railroad, Asheville Division. It’s a tight pike with Ashville dead center and trains coming out to run the main loop correctly using the wye at Old Fort. A lot of fun here, because just about every train enters/exits the line at this location, locals work here, and most of the passenger trains turn here. So it’s busy and requires lots of […]

October 24, 2015

OpsLog – TC&C – 10/24/2015

he problem of running the DS panel so well (see last night’s session here) is that when we’re all standing around the next day picking jobs on the morning session shift, everyone pushes you back into the office job again. So we’re at the Tennessee Carolina & Coast, a layout I ran on two years ago. Great pike, just a long basement filler with good aisles, a long siding or two, and slow running. I had to be careful here – no clock so I set the pace running trains when I think we can get them through. The line […]

October 24, 2015

OpsLog – ATSF – 10/24/2015

he AT&SF Railway Henderson District – long and yellow and low-hilled, that’s pretty much the early scenery. This creation has a long folded plan with a huge central yard and a string of ATSF-feel station areas along its right of way. And no, this time, I flatly refused to dispatch. So in return, I found myself in the seat of a warbonnet E-8, fully sounded, running easy across the prairie, cutting in on the station tracks, forking out my fob-watch to keep track of the three-minute stops, sizzling by towns where dour-face local-crews waited on shimmering sidings as we polished […]

October 25, 2015

Yukikaze (Review)

his one originated off some beautiful (but confusing) anime I’d viewed. Having just read All you need is Kill (which I only now realize I haven’t reviewed yet), I noticed on their website that two Yukikaze books were available. Okay, so I’d enjoyed Kill so much (Japanese scifi) that I figured I’d pick them up. Enough about me. Yukikaze is about our world, fifteen minutes into the future. A strange hyperspace portal appears over Antarctica and out of it comes the JAM. We’ve only seen their fighters and bombers, never figured out who they were or what they are. The […]

October 26, 2015

OpsLog – BN (Formerly DT&I) – 10/25/2015

o, my falling fortunes. On Friday evening, I was dispatching a heavy mountain line in the profitable 50s from a brick building in downtown Asheville. By Saturday morning, I’d been bumped out into the Tennessee wilderness, dispatching a declining railroad in the 60’s-70’s, now likely in a peeling wood-frame draft-palace in some little Podunk town. Saturday afternoon, my career continued to slide, down to engineer of a crack passenger train out west, down to running a sharp little local pulling in rolling stock from mainline towns. But by Sunday morning, I was out in some industrial bad land (it looked […]

October 29, 2015

Where does it go? (DOG EAR)

uesday night, nestled between two evenings at the train club. Usually a quiet night, one phone call from my best friend, not much else. Maybe a good writing night. And now its 10:12 PM and I haven’t gotten even into the TNM2 folder. Where did all my writing time go? Well, let’s see. After dinner, I had to catch the site up. I had two book reviews to write, and a Dog Ear. That took some time. Then there was the shared Solar Trader game my buddy and I are jointly playing (passing it back and forth). See, it only […]

November 1, 2015

All You Need Is Kill (Review)

ou might know this one as Edge of Tomorrow. Or you might not. It was a pretty good flick (saw it last night) but, as is true with all books and movies, the book is soooo much better. In this Japanese SciFi story, alien nanotech falls into our oceans and spawn with various creatures to make “Mimics”, starfishy things that are nearly impossible to kill and attack en-mass. All we have to fight them are battle armor, and that isn’t much good – a squad’s gotta pour on firepower to kill just one of these things. But this isn’t Keiji […]