Farnham – Page 3 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

May 19, 2024

OpsLog – FEC – 05/18/2024

ell, this just shows the dangers of over-scheduling. In my defense, we’d agreed to have “night ops” at the club layout this Saturday, and then a few days later the FEC crew call came out. The club is a commitment I have to honor (and it’s fun) but the FEC hasn’t run in six months and I wanted to jump back aboard (it’s also fun). So that’s it – run to Palm Bay in the morning, operate until late afternoon, then burn across half the state to the LM&O for the evening session. And I had a sandwich with me […]

July 28, 2024

OpsLog – FEC – 7/27/2024

kay, this one will be a tough one to write. Sure, the first train out got routed wrong out of the yard. There, are you happy? I admit it. To make it worse, the last train in also misrouted down the wrong track and hit a train on the departure tracks. So full disclosure. But while we’re spreading blame on toast, let’s not forget that every local, every local, worked long today. I had delays at Palm bay, at Pinetta, Buenaventura, Frontenac, Titusville and the whole Cocoa stretch. If locals worked clear of the main, they did fine. But work […]

August 25, 2024

OpsLog – FEC – 8/24/2024

ough day for me on the Florida East Coast. Evidently we simulated love-bug season. I could hardly see out of the cab and the wipers didn’t help. Squinting for half the session. But that comes in later. So Ken wanted to dispatch and in a surprise move, put Zach into the trim job (I’ve done it several times – it’s good casual fun). This, of course, meant we could all talk about Zach in the ops shed, so it was an amusing day. Delighted to find myself moving road units – been a long time. My first job was the […]

April 21, 2025

OpsLog – FEC – 4/19/2024

n the ride over to Palm Bay and the Farnham’s Florida East Coast, Kyle and I discussed ways we could help Ken make the railroad a little easier to prepare. We do drive over to Doc’s WAZU to help stage and clean. Maybe something like that would keep the FEC enjoyable for the Farnhams (and operational for us) in the coming years. I guess what we did give him was a wonderful session. Kyle and I seem to have the Midas Touch for sessions these days. We’ve had a string of good ones. The best thing was that we were trying to […]

June 29, 2025

OpsLog – FEC – 6/28/2025

aybe I’m expecting too much from my hobby of operations? Don’t know. The last few haven’t been so hot. And for this session, it’s not the fault of the Farnhams (no, it falls pretty much on the operators but a bit on the weather, too) but the June run of the Florida East Coast was a tough session. How tough? Got home by 8pm and fell into bed to “read” and crashed for nine hours solid (would have been ten, but the cats demanded their due (i.e. food)). So what went wrong? Well, we knew going in that the Market […]

July 28, 2025

OpsLog – FEC – 7/26/2025

ne of my favorite runs – the Florida East Coast. And funny anecdote – I’d been dispatching so much recently (twice this week already) that when I wrote Ken and asked if maybe I could just run trains this time, he quickly agreed, making me double-think it. Was I not that good? Did I do something wrong last time? Why doesn’t he beg me to run the panel? Turns out he wanted to run a more intimate session (not with candles and romantic music and a valentine chocolate box, no, but with only five engineers in the room. He’d generated […]

August 24, 2025

OpsLog – FEC – 8/23/2025

hen you die and Saint Peter says to you, “Hey, when were you happiest down there?” You’re gonna say, “Well, it was okay the day I got married, and I didn’t much mind the day I first fell in love. But seein’ the sky with the Great Waldo Pepper, that beats ’em all.” -The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) Personally, my own end-life reflections would turn to all the many moments model trains and their operations have given me. There have been soaring successes and comical pratfalls. And here’s a new one: I’m standing out in the back yard of Ken […]