Florida

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]