Train Blog

I‘ve got my train orders and am climbing into my idling Florida East Coast engine in Hialeah Yard. Everything’s coupled up and I’m ready to call the dispatcher and highball onto the main. Except that I’m 20 feet away, behind two doors and across a patio. But it works. Ken Farnham, the owner of this HO pike, had a bit of a problem – he wanted to put an HO layout in a structure in his back yard but zoning would not permit anything save a smaller shed. Even if he chose two small sheds, they couldn’t be joined together. […]

The heat’s on! I’m in the dispatching chair tonight. We’ve got a full house of operators and a cameraman from a local PBS station doing a piece of the various clubs. I don’t want to kill anyone on camera – how embarrassing that would be, but I don’t want to stall the railroad with over-caution. So I’m pushing iron and getting things moved. Harris Glen’s been reworked. The high summit’s got a a main, a short siding, and an even shorter station track (like a siding, but right along a station platform). Two passenger trains (Silver Bullet 1 and 2) […]

I‘m going to keep this short – I’m pretty tired. Just got back from Europe the other day, shepherding a wife with a broken arm home (not an understatement – she has an operation Monday). For the last few weeks, everything has been different: different cities, people, languages, everything. Got back into town and sure enough, we have an ops session the next day. I’m pretty tired but I need to be there (well, my computer with the dispatching program needs to be there). So I show and the layout is staged and with just a bit of cleaning, we’re […]

Elsewhere on my blogs (namely here) you can read about our recent disastrous trip to the Rhine, where my wife broke her arm and we were stuck for two days in the hotel room in Amsterdam. As you might expect, with all the caregiving and work catchup and stuff, I wasn’t too excited that our club had a Deland Show the first weekend we got back. But still, yes, I’d have rather stayed in bed, but if I had to do a train show, I can’t imagine a better way to do it. The modular layout went together like a […]

The first real session on the Tipton, Youngstown & Erie. I’d prototyped a timetable for JW to use – all he had to do was move the times a bit and add a couple of cornfields and he had it. But in this, one of my favorite runs in the design was a LEM to Sandmine, picking up sand and log cars, then a turn and a long run to Staffordtown. Exchange the cars on those sidings, then back to respot for the next day.                         When the jobs […]

So I’m sitting in my little yard goat, chugging up the passing siding with four cars in front. All I gotta do to finish this job oh-so-slick is to take the four cars and the engine out the other end, run down the length of my train, shove everything back together, and home-we-go. So I’m pushing into the tail track off the end of the passing track, pushing in, watching the space between the front car’s coupler and that bumper drain away. And now it’s close, close, and the brakeman in the front swings his hands out – cut! No […]

Matthew, our cub dispatcher, is certain I’m going to write about him tonight. I’ll bet you think this blog is about you – don’t you? don’t you? (Between you and me, dear Reader, we did have an across-the-division slowdown in trains and a couple of the later runs annulled. But seriously, the kid was running noticeably more in control. I am aware of no cornfields, and he seemed more careful in his warrants. About the same speed, but better than last time). I was on 244, a freight out of Cincinnati, heading towards Bound Brook. Paul was filling out as […]

I‘ve known Terry Harrison for ten years and three layouts. He’s a sawed-off hot-head, an ill-tempered tosser who harangues his operators. He also designs some of the most realistic switching I’ve ever worked. I’ve worked setouts and pickups on layouts that were about as exciting as putting socks into a drawer. And then there are the layouts with owners who are so sadistically clever, they force their crews to work through complicated logic puzzles, as if the railroad is more a mensa club than a working transportation company. But Terry’s worked on actual railroads and knows what they do and […]