clinics – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

January 12, 2023

Public Speaking (DOG EAR)

o I got railroaded (har-dee-har-har) into giving a two hour-long clinics at Protorails, a convention of model railroaders who focus on the prototypical. Mine was named TT&TO for Dummies, an introductory course about how trains were dispatched from pre-Civil War until recently (when you don’t have any direct communication or control over the crews). I took a Dale Carnegie at work a couple of years back. It taught me a couple of things: First, you need to prepare, testing out your speech to make sure you have it down flat, that you can pick right back up after an interruption […]

March 17, 2026

MeetLog – Vero Beach – 3/16/2026

he Eastern Model Railroad Meet (ironic since, recently, the eastern division of the sunshine region of the NMRA was recently abolished) was held today, way way down in Vero Beach today. Since two N-Trakers were asked to come down and speak (me, on TT&TO, and Reverend Jim, because I badgered him into speaking last minute on T-Trak because “Weren’t you a public speaker?” works really well. We also had Joel Morse (“Layout planning for operations”) and Host Chip Pecere (“Designing your layout before construction”). Interesting, two other people cancelled out of the one Jim covered (“Introduction to T-Trak Modelling”) (Including no-show […]