Night – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

October 4, 2020

Night Flights (Review)

he fifth of the Mortal Engines series, a YA franchise where, following the 60-second war, towns rebuilt on tracked platforms and chase each other, practicing “Urban Darwinism” by eating each other. And there’s airships and strange tech and interesting people, the usual. It’s a breezy-easy read, perfect for YAs and for reviewers who need to come up with a review a week to keep the blog fires burning. About the book – this time its about Anna Fang, anti-tractionist terrorist, kick-ass air captain, and later a nasty cyborg that launches an all-out global war. But this is about young Anna, […]

April 17, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O (Night Ops) – 4/16/2022

t’s 8:15am in the Cincinnati rail yards. I’ve got some SP F3’s coupled to the 244 consist (and some geeps stuck in, since my slow-rollers wouldn’t even get them out of the yard in my test pulls while waiting for go-time). But lights are on, engines are rumbling, we’re good to go. At half-past, two blasts of the horn and I’m pushing hard, fixed on making Carbon Hill for my first meet of the day. The F-units, one time my pride, are really running bad. They seem to need a warm up session to get them moving. By the time […]

July 14, 2024

Night on the Galactic Railroad (Review)

his is an interesting collection of the works of Kenji Miyazawa, the son of a Japanese pawnbroker who wrote in the early 1900s. His stories and interesting mixes of astronomy and whimsy, tales of troubled heroes under starry skies. My favorite, one of the oddest of the bunch, is the story of Signal and Signal-less, a tale of lovers separated by an insurmountable distance of a hundred yards. You see, “Signal” is a train signal on a modern main line, while “Signal-less” is a signal on a nearby branch line. They are both rooted in their spots but can only […]