Model – Page 9 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

June 9, 2023

On Sheet – Guest Owner

‘ve written about my diminutive Tuscarora Branch Lines often. It’s the focus of my life right now, getting it right and adding more scenery. I love doing ops, and our sessions are getting bigger and bigger (last time we had six attendees). But now I’m giving the railroad away. What, the physical layout? No. But I had my friend Kyle bring his English equipment late last year. While we ran the usual schedule, we called it “Tusk Hill”. It had a really European flair. And, of course, switching was a lot easier with those dinky cars. I talked about it […]

June 15, 2023

OpsLog – LM&O – 06/14/2023

ight has fallen and the chill has sunk in between the low Zanesville hills. The auto plant is humming as is the furniture factory (a pity since the local never showed up today). And me? I’m stuck in this rotting tower, most of the levers out of service, nothing but a second story train order office. Looking west, I suddenly see a headlight stabbing out of Below Notman tunnel. I check the watch – 7:30 PM. That means… to the east, the low form of a drag freight comes around the raised hillock under the GM plant. I lift up […]

June 16, 2023

On Scope – Learning Curve

‘ve been dreaming of operating since I was about six. And I’ve been doing it since I was 28 or so (in retrospect, I’m 64 now). So I’ve operated a lot. I remember my first ops session on my home layout – I invited my father and one of his friends over. I had some sort of sequential thing set up. But they just sat on their train room stools, drank coffee and told Navy yarns. I didn’t have a lot of luck at the club until one or two other members gave it a try. Yes, there were a […]

June 18, 2023

OpsLog – Tusk Hill – 6/17/2023

ilson P. Sloan tossed a leg over a knee and settled in his seat, snapping open his newspaper as his train pulled into the Tusk Hill station. Having completed his effort to meet with solicitors of a Westly-based firm, he’d managed to catch the last Up Train to London. Now his luck appeared to have run its course. What was supposed to be a three-minute station stop was dragging on. Outside, one of the last midland steam engines in existence puffed past, dragging a goods wagon. Railroad business. Sloan couldn’t be bothered. He focused on the business section of his […]

June 20, 2023

OpsLog – CSX Taft – 6/19/2023

‘m suffering survivors’ guilt right now. See, we ran on Chris Strecker’s CSX Taft railroad, a small two man pike with two jobs – the guy running the freights and the other running the local switcher (stationed at Orlando’s Taft Yard). The crews work their jobs for the first half-day (twelve slow laps of the freight, with drop-work done enroute). And the local, he preps up outbound cars and spots in dropped inbounds. Then you swap jobs. In theory, under the law of averages, in game-science, the crews should face the same amount of effort. Should. That’s the operative word. […]

June 23, 2023

On Sheet – Extra Board

t all started with a yawn. A fella was running coal on my Tuscarora a year back. To make interference for the local, the computer would come up with a random list of coal runs to make (such as make three loaded laps one way, two empties the other, run the engine light to the far end, run three more laps…). When I asked if he was okay, he told me he was bored. Everyone else on the railroad was working hard and pondering how to do their jobs. He was just chauffeuring coal. To fix this, I had a […]

July 2, 2023

OpsLog – TBL – 7/1/2023

t’s a lazy afternoon in Easton Depot. I’m fanning myself with a timetable, pushing away the humid heat that hangs over Western Pennsylvania. Distantly, a dispatcher who sounds a lot like me tells me that a coal extra is inbound, heading west to Tuscarora and the mines beyond. No orders. Nodding, I kick at the desk-mounted train order lever with my foot, setting the signal to green. Of course he’ll stop anyway, regardless if the signal was green, red or purple. There’s the westbound Easton Turn just airing up at Tuscarora, number 612 on the timetable. So I figure the […]

July 7, 2023

On Sheet – Divergent Evolutions

didn’t know I was actually setting up an experiment on evolutions of thinking and divergent game science. I was just making a small switching layout. As has been covered here ad nauseam, I’m talking about my own Tuscarora, a layout that started as a 2×4 switching puzzle and has turned into a operations empire. Our last session (NOTED HERE) ran with seven operators over three hours. I’ve given NMRA clinics on the design stage I went through (not preplanned in any way) that I used to come up with operations on this micro layout. Basically, it was basic switching, the […]

July 14, 2023

On Sheet – Peeps

remember the moment my doctor told me I had cancer. I remember life being normal and then it was not. The next two days I don’t remember at all. And two weeks later, I had to dispatch our club layout. At the time I was the only dispatcher. I seem to recall the guys running flawless. It was a good session. The goofs were minor and we worked around them. But I suspect that if someone did something stupid (it has happened) or back-talked me on the phones (this, also), I’d have lost my total freaking shit. I don’t know […]

July 21, 2023

On Sheet – Sound Check

ou know, DCC is a wonderful thing. Now we can drive trains and blink the lights and sound the whistle and bell. I’ve always wondered what those rheostat twisters in the ’50s would have thought of us now with all our digitalized magic. Just the options of not relying on electrical blocks allows us to run helpers and do all sorts of cool things. However, one thing that always bugs me is when, during operations, you see an engineer just driving along, toot-tooting his whistle in patterns only known to him, as cute yet pointless as Thomas the Tank Engine. […]