Train Blog

I’ll be flying to San Diego to operate on La Mesa’s massive Tehachapi railroad layout this weekend with five club-members. How massive are we talking? It’s 25 scale miles long. A mile is 60’ 8”, so that’s 1516 feet long. If you ran a train 60 mph along it, it would take 25 minutes to get from Mojave to Bakersfield. As track speed is about 25 mph, it will take a first class train an hour to complete a run. One time it took me six hours to move a set of cab-forward helpers (running as extras) down the hill […]

Here’s a word problem for you: Our black-widow lashup of Southern Pacific F-3 diesels idles in the afternoon sun at Bena in 1952 at the head of a seventy-car string. We are the fifth (and final) section of train 804 (meaning there are four sections ahead of us, the fourth section 10 minutes down the line). It is now 1:40PM. As head-end engineer, I’ve gone back to meet with my two helper engineers (midtrain and rear) to discuss our next move. Positionally, we are located as follows: Kern Jct (Bakersfield) – 10 minutes behind us Bena (where we are at) […]

Hosting an ops session is a good example of Murphy’s law. I showed up at Docs a little early to set up the dispatcher’s office, eager to see his newest effort – a train-cam which an engineer would use to run the train from a cab-level-view from the dispatcher’s office. It’s been a subject of model railroad conjecture for years now. So it’s run for two weeks – Doc’s even got a video of an earlier test run. And now it’s showtime and the camera fails. Nothing. I can see he’s disappointed and I feel for him. I can remember […]

I’ve had the grim distinction of being audited by Earnest and Young for Sarbanes Oxley compliance. Pretty much every changed line of workplace software code needs review signatures and unit tests. And here I was, sitting with my boss while E&Y scowled over the phone at us, realizing we didn’t have any testing at all on a change we’d made. Blood in the water… Image my relief when closer examination showed a note from myself to the coder, clearly saying, “Close after attaching test cases”. And what did he do? He just closed it. Suddenly the eye of Sauron swung […]

Usually it doesn’t go this well. Doc had brought his secondary layout back into service, his tightly-spooled San Diego and Eastern Arizona. We’d run it a while ago, but not recently. And since it’s been slightly shortened and simplified, all to the better. So the boys milled in the train room while I set up the dispatching computer. A little fumbling with the clock, a scattering of radio checks, and we went hot. Timetables usually go out the window once the session starts. Sure, the railroad management might think a certain siding might be an ideal place for two trains […]

The Jacksonville lift bridge is rattling from a constant stream of rail traffic, so much so that the draw bridge has been down for two days straight. More amazing – if you looked into the cabs of the huge Genesis, Dash-9s and Big Boys, you’d find a 10 year old boy or girl at the throttle and a grinning older conductor sitting back in the brakeman seat, enjoying the ride. It’s our second performance for the new layout at Deland, a great showplace for our new techniques and efforts. Since last time, we expanded scenery 12 feet (the urban Jacksonville […]

Last night’s session started at 7:40pm and ran until 10:15pm. But not really. It actually started at 10pm a week before when Mark John and I worked the lading slips for every freight car across the line. The three industrial areas were easy; just flip whatever cars you wished to indicate their completed loading/unloading. The staging was a little more difficult: we had to inspect the car numbers to make sure the right cars were on the right trains, THEN replace the waybills in the correct cars. Martin Classification Yard was the worst; either an overwhelmed yardmaster or joyriding operators had scrambled things. […]

Well, I hit the invisible corporate-webspace-phonebox wall. We’re building a traveling layout for our club, a space-aged module effort that puts our creaky old N-trak clunkers to shame. Sets up quick. Breaks down quick. Moves easy. No duckunders. Fun to run. And we’re doing REAL modeling of real places (specifically the run from Jacksonville to Folkston). We’ve got the river area in at Jacksonville, the CSX building, the convention center, the Acosta bridge. While I’m working south towards the Aetna building, we’ll also need to cross under the I-95 double-span bridge and model the TTX shops. See, TTX has a […]

According to my records, my last operation’s session was back in May of last year. After that, time slipped by as I worked to get the club’s traveling layout up, my book out, and my parents faced some medical issues. Time just moved on. With twisted guts, I decided to get this thing running again. Time to host. I hate getting ready but generally love the sessions. Getting ready involves cleaning all sorts of track (some of it in difficult-to-reach places), cleaning engines, checking paperwork. But really, its gone pretty well. My helper Mikado really didn’t want to go – […]