operations – Page 20 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

November 16, 2025

OpsLog – TBL – 11/15/2025

adn’t run Tuscarora (my microlayout) for some time so I announced I’d be at the clubhouse Saturday and figured I’d run the railroad on my own. That being the case, I got out all the cars I hadn’t fully tested (or struggled with in the past) set up and cleaned it, and got ready for action. Had an extra gondola car (dropped by the midnight eastbound) to spot over at the brewery and two coal hoppers deadheading about, so my session was going to be busy. The first two “scale” hours were pretty slow. Not only was I having to […]

November 17, 2025

OpsLog – WAZU – 11/16/2025

ot going to say I was nervous – no, perhaps a little concerned. Doc Andy’s session on the WAZU was coming up and for some reason I asked my wife if she’d like to run with us. So the only way this would work was if she could run one of the remote trains in the other room, sitting at a desk with a forward camera car view and a bank of monitors of the train room up on the wall. This was better than the moshpit layout room, where you feel like you are jammed inside a rush hour […]

November 25, 2025

OpsLog – Highland Division – 11/23/2025

o I’m sitting in my office in the back of Bank Tower, writing out train orders. It was just after 7am and the Bristol Local was calling for paper out. I wrote him a simple “Run Extra” order. Then I got the call from the station operator at Waterbury that he’d departed (i.e. I peeked over there). Okay, so sure. Grinchy grin on my face, darkness in my heart, all that. He got about a mile down the tracks and met (cowcatcher to cowcatcher) the first westbound passenger train of the day. So, emergency stopping or smoldering bodies scattered down […]

November 27, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O – 11/26/2025

ecently we ran out pre-Thanksgiving operation session, a chance to escape the ravages of relatives, and to have fun running trains before having to listen to your drunk uncle explain why the Earth is flat over the ruins of the feast. We had a pretty good crowd for it – not the usual pre-turkey-packer because of last-minute cancellations, but it was still enough to run all that needs-to be-ran and have fun with all that can be fun. But in flying over the confusion in my dispatchocopter, I realized how much I have to be thankful for. To wit- Thankful […]