Train Blog

“You said you wanted to dispatch sometime,” Ken said with his usual friendly demeanor. “How about today?” “Sure,” I smiled. Holy crispy crap, I thought. Ken’s three-room layout represents sixty miles of Florida East Coast mainline – huge! He’s also got a a half-dozen serious operators taking their starting positions, reviewing their train orders, checking out their paperwork, as serious as career engineers. This is not the place to screw up. He walks me through the CTC board, essentially that big black 2001 monolith bristling with lights and toggles. I’ll be the dispatcher today, setting switches and signals in to get the traffic […]

Good session at the club tonight. One of our experienced dispatchers took a trainee (who is about to graduate it seems) to run the board. That put me out on the road. Good enough – I don’t get to run enough trains. First run was an unlikely lashup of old passenger E-8s (daylight colors) pulling modern TOFCs. Okay. Grabbed a newbie who was thinking of wallflowering and put him into the cab (I’d conduct). Picked up orders and off we went, east out of Martin Yard. It looked like it was going to be one of those nights. The two […]

I wrote this bit ages ago, a rebuttal for some smarty who gave ten reasons while Microsoft Train Simulator was better than model railroading. Isn’t it amazing what you can Google up on the slow work week between the holidays when the boss is on the other side of the world?   Why model railroading is better than MSTS. 1) I can buy engines or rolling stock, take them home, set them on the layout and run them in any way (and in any activity) I want. I don’t have to modify files to make them work. 2) When people […]

Last session of the year, over at Docs. It was supposed to be a casual get together over hot dogs followed by a clean-n-stage, but Doc with his remarkable boyish enthusiasm had gotten everything ready beforehand. And so there we were, literally thrown into a session without a dispatcher, just running in look-ahead rules, casual fun. Took the Sterling Turn out of North Platte (flipping industry waybills as I went). Lots of traffic on the line, people poking ahead to negotiate meets with each other. Strange moment – Doc dragooned my wife to run, so here she comes in control […]

Doc Andy’s got a double garage of layout, a sprawling run of Union Pacific and Santa Fe from Council Bluffs to Denver. Half of it is shared trackage, half parallel mainlines. It’s massive and fun and impressive. I’m there for the session but I won’t see a single car move. I’m in the main house, upstairs in the den. I’ve got a timetable in front of me, a repeater clock, the timetable and my computer. On its screen is a schematic of the railroad in Excel with colored cells containing train numbers. I’ve got a radio in my hand and […]

You know you are a Model Railroader when… Look, I’m kitbashing up the bunker-like building between the CSX HQ and the Jacksonville terminal for the traveling layout. Gray, slablike, etc. Got lots of pictures outside (dull pictures because it’s a dull building). And then I looked on LiveSeachMaps to see what the roof looked like. The concrete slabwork, I can do. The AC boxes, I can buy. But there is a big circular skylight that had me stumped. I went through Colonial’s Walther’s catalog – nothing. Looked all over the house. Nothing. Looking at it again, I realized how much […]

I love going to Dick’s ops. Its been down for a while, but its a handy little railroad with a casual session. Best thing is that its a mile or so from my house, an easy bike ride. Good group showed for the Grand Reopening. Took a job footplating in Cheyenne yard, cleaning up the paperwork and getting the crew rolling. But Don’s clever so I leave him to it, hooking a freight out of the yard, a flat run to Chicago. The layout’s live around me and I’m enjoying the nice scenery, passing trains and watching for open turnouts […]

Short haul out of Points North down to Cocoa, where I’ll dump my four cars and shut down my unit. The main’s clogging – past the restrictions at Jay Jay’s, I find three freights holding at Titusville, watching their signals, eager to head home. Slip past that parade on the siding, then beg the dispatcher to give me a green, please! Finally get to Frontenac, where I’d pushed coal about a power plant early this night-session. There is a detector there. In reality, it would sniff up a passing train’s skirts, checking speed and hotboxes and such, then broadcast its […]