operations – Page 10 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

May 22, 2023

OpsLog – WAZU – 5/21/2023

o there were four levels of operational expertise in our long, busy and fun session at the Union Pacific WAZU (for whatever reason it’s called that, nobody knows. But it simulates the line between Spokane to Portland). First off, there is the remarkable effort by AJ to sit on the dispatcher’s panel and run this very busy line for four hours. I’ve done it, and while the dispatching is straight-forwards, the communications aren’t the best, the crews don’t OS as well as they could, and it’s a long session. But AJ wanted to try and he was on his own […]

May 25, 2023

OpsLog – LM&O – 5/24/2023

hey came from beyond high orbits, disk-like vessels that slid into the atmosphere, nudging past Chinese spy balloons, descending over an unsuspecting America. On their steel underbellies, access ports irised open and the cold muzzles of alien devices slid forth, tracking along the faint railline running across the eastern mountains. These were no deathrays, no, nor atomizers or any one of traditional alien destructo-beams. These were capture rays, used to pluck fishermen out of rowboats and yahoos out of cornfields. The aliens had come with capture on their vast, cool, unsympathetic minds. Their plans were carefully considered. The first beam […]

June 4, 2023

OpsLog – WBRR – 06/03/2023

he teletype was idly clicking a slow message, a new dispatcher getting an OS report from Navajo down the line about a train coming east. Since I’m at Dulce, I shouldn’t even see that train – he’ll swing off my line at Ute Junction and head to the other division, through Placerville and Dolores. But really, it’s not my problem. I’m checking over the paperwork of a westbound peddler train standing in my station, ready to depart. Yes, it looked good. I don’t remember what pulled me away from my Dulce job. With long arms and a sneaky manner, I […]

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 29, 2023

OpsLog – LM&O – 6/29/2023

helfton Turn raddled into Martin Yard, having done its work in respectful time. Its engineer called yardmaster Perry White, asking where he could drop these outbounds and grab the Zanesville Turn. White, old beyond his years but oddly lacking seniority, directed the drop and grab move. He mused at the rapidity with which the engineer swapped out and accelerated out of the yard. It was like he was some sort of Superman. This engineer was not of this railroad or even of this Earth. The sole surviving member of a planet destroyed when its DC modules exploded, and who described […]

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 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. […]

July 23, 2023

OpsLog – FEC – 7/22/2023

smell something burning.” I was working the out-n-back from Cocoa Yard to Frontenac, fussing over mismarked lading slips, trying to figure out what someone did and didn’t do a couple of weeks back in City Point (without a Rosetta Stone, either). And that’s when I smelled smoke. Engineer Chip was working the lower deck. When I asked him if his engine was on a switch, he told me no. But a car on his train was on a switch, one that had been set against him. And the truck of a wheel delicately placed with love between a rail and […]