Model – Page 4 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 28, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 10/28/2021

eft-seating it in a pair of beat up old C&NW units, rattling down through the spiral tunnel below Harris Glen, running to Lehigh and a possible meet. I’m conducting for a young scout, Aryon. The kid’s got a steady throttle hand and is drifting the helpers down to Calypso nice and easy. The club’s full of people tonight – visitors, a group of boy scouts, lots of people. Most of them have been put on trains as engineers, the guys giving up their throttles to allow newbies to realize that trains are more than just circles of tracks. Trains are […]

November 7, 2021

OpsLog – WVN – 11/06/2021

harlie might be ecstatic over his golden ticket to the chocolate factory. But it’s nothing compared to getting a slot on the the Komar’s West Virginia Northern. I mean, crap’s stake, I gotta get up at 6am, leave by 6:30 and drive for over two hours (in the rain) to get there. Yeah, it’s that good! Don’t believe me? How about this? Since I was first in the door, I got first dibs on job and I took my new favorite, the Ashbury Hostler. My post was way down in the back of this photo (you can just make out […]

November 19, 2021

OpsLog – TBL – 11/19/2021

ad to go out to the club and wait for the alarm guy so I decided, since I haven’t run since thousands of people required my assistance for every little thing, I’d run a switching session on the Tuscarora. And to make it fun, I’d run the full tower (using signals) too! The main thing was to see how my SW-7 would work. Right before the NMRA convention the chip croaked (three weeks out of warranty). I originally had a Paragon 3 sound decoder installed (it’s what it came with). New ones are shipping with 4s – Craig LeVasseur noted […]

November 25, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 11/24/2021

ow that was depressing. It’s my birthday. My wife is in the hospital for observation for her dicky heart. I need something to take my mind off everything. It’s ops night! Great! Nobody showed. Honest, our other pre-Thanskgiving events were always well-attended. Everyone stayed late because it was a holiday tomorrow. But this time some people had to work, some people were traveling, and some people took the cheap way out and had passed away. We had six guys running the layout on their own. So no dispatcher and not a lot of chatter. We ran two freight trains, a […]

January 27, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 1/26/2022

t was touch and go whether we’d get enough crew for a session but right before 7:30, the roster filled out. Some us took early trains, some of us had to wait for later trains, and some of us sat and chatted. And from the central table, many an amusing story was recounted. I picked one right off the bat – I’d given a buddy my Zanesville Turn but did the next best, a shakedown run of an express parts train from Mingo Interchange to the LeVasseur Plant. Brought over the cars, pushed them (racks and then long boxes) in […]

February 24, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/23/2022

don’t know why it is. I’m like a symphony conductor who has directed a piece hundreds of times and still feels like he needs to throw up into the tuba section right before the performance commences. I always get uptight before a session, even if it’s only the club. But club ops are a big deal. We have a lot of people who only come out for the ops. And tonight showed why that was. We shined tonight. We had a bunch of guests and a lot of members ready to run. I was actually amazed at the traffic – […]

February 28, 2022

OpsLog – WAZU – 02/27/2022

o, if we thought we were running a lot of trains in tight confines for the LM&O the other night, we were sadly mistaken. The WAZU (running from Spokane to Portland) was the place to be in Oburg on a beautiful Sunday afternoon. Great Guns, but was it a brisk day on the highline! So, since our last shaky session, we saw a number of improvements. First off, Bill’s card system was in full force this time around. This meant that the yards were busy and there were actually a couple of real life locals in place (maybe Bob K […]

March 20, 2022

OpsLog – LM&0 – 3/19/2022

t’s said that no plan survives the first contact with the enemy. It is also true for timetables surviving the first day’s operations. So Orlando N-Trak attempted something few clubs have ever tried – we ran a Saturday Night Special session under Time Table & Train Order. This (as you know) is the method used by most lines from 1840 until 1960 (or later). Essentially trains proceed by rights established by class and direction, making meets at established locations when they can, and earlier (if facing superior trains) when they can’t. And extras? They need to swim upstream keeping an […]

March 24, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 3/23/2022

o, the dispatchers report: not much for on-the-ground action, but you get the birds-eye view of the session, high above the muddy-cinder-level viewpoint of the engineers. I can tell you I kicked out 83 warrants, a good amount (which comes out to about one every two minutes or so – counting readback time (and calling overhead for information – more on that bitch-point later), that’s air-traffic-control-level busy. We ran five freights (I’m going to take 271 out next time I run – he’s been annulled twice now). We ran three of the four passenger trains. Two locals went out (Shelfton […]

April 25, 2022

OpsLog – WAZU – 4/22/2022

t’s always good to see a layout progress from session to session. And today’s running of the WAZU railroad (a reference I’m not sure anyone gets) was no exception. Last session was good; this one was better. We have to applaud the efforts of Doc and Sparky, who personally made operations improvement goal one. In this, they reworked the card system in the yards (including making sure everything was pre-staged and the yards carried reduced car loads (a mistake a lot of modelers make)). Also, the turnout controls were reconfigured with led to a lot less fumbling for switch throws. […]