orlando – Page 7 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 16, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O TT&TO – 2/15/2025

‘ve always said that not many model train clubs (especially temperamental-equipment N-scale clubs) do what we do. We pack more trains into a session than anyone. Last night, on our Saturday Night Special, we really went all out on a Time Table & Train Order session, where men are men and the dead are pulped. Our timetable has eight scheduled trains. Given the wide range of times and outcomes for locals, we have to run them all as extras. And under TT&TO, extras generate paperwork. The time we ran with just scheduled trains last year, I think I wrote John […]

February 27, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/26/2025

f the club has a motto for operations, it’s “Work it out on the ground”. Last night, it was more like “Wring it out of the Clown” with West-Side Dispatcher as the clown. Another “Have a beer when I get home” night at the old clubhouse. So the session started out well enough. We were running an LV Interchange train, a run that we’ll see if we can keep up with it. It’s a bit time-challenged but yes, it might work. But I’d talked things out with the locals (Mingo and Zanesville) and made a pinky promise with 927 (ZV) […]

March 27, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O – 3/26/2025

t was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But doesn’t every OpsLog start like this? The important thing here is that we gradually get better. In prepping the photographs for this blog, I noticed a number of properly-done background things (such as cars off-spotted correctly). As simple as it seems, it means that our operators are learning. Every session is a bit better than the last. And so, in this blog, I’ll be listing the lessons we (or, at least, “I”) learned. You’ll see them in bold. Okay, from my point of view, I came on […]

May 11, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O (SNS) – 5/10/2025

kay, so this was a test flight. We were confident in our flight worthiness. Experienced crews. Casual weekend. Fully planned. With crosswinds. And thunderstorms. And the lights and radars were out. And a UFO was stooging about the boundary fence. We’d all come out for a Saturday Night Special, where fewer people means more elbow room and a chance to engage in more difficult operations. It’s rather fun, a challenge. Tonight was a two-for – TT&TO ops in a new and untested format, and an interlocking district (run by a towerman and signaller) in the Lehigh to Bethlehem stretch. First […]

May 29, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O – 5/28/2025

wo years ago, I was writing weekly pieces on train ops to a Facebook N-scale page. Reverend Jim and John DV know this guy who hosts it (“knew”, rather). Anyway, I’d also add our OpsLogs to his page so his readers could enjoy our massive sessions. And you know me – I try to punch up the sessions with drama and humor. Well, after one submission, the guy responds (I don’t remember verbatim – I left the page following this). Anyway, he told us me that we needed to get better. This chaos and confusion was amateur-level stuff and clearly […]

June 15, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O (TT&TO) – 6/14/2025

pecial Leigh, Monongahela & Ohio session for the evening of Father’s Day (or, for me, Dead-twig-on-the-tree-of-life day). On occasional Saturday nights, we turn up the difficulty level and run the LM&O in the early fifties, with train orders and the Bethlehem tower in service with its block signals (actually, little joke, they are interlocking signals. If you were there, you’d know what the deal was). Suddenly the crews are forced to think on their literal feet, determining their own movements, ducking into sidings and meeting opposing trains while running on their schedules. And I’m happy to say that we had […]

June 26, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O – 6/25/2025

was in a pretty mellow mood when I got to the club Wednesday. It might have been because all morning I’d been moving boxes of books (just like cubes of wood, but with writing, not rings, inside their slices) until noon or so, in the hot Florida sun. I’d had a beer at dinner and settled in the back desk to set up the clocks and computer and run the railroad. I don’t know if that explains my easy-going nature that night, and I have no explanation why the rest of you were all so… tetchy. We have that phrase, […]

July 13, 2025

ShowLog – Deland – 7/12/2025

ig one-day show for us over in Deland, make quite exciting because I’d be show boss and Old Man Raiford would not be around for set up. Had a new driver, Leonard, who took away any concerns on my part by moving the trailer around like a seasoned switch crew with a boxcar (though that plastic parking post was a little worse for wear after we went through). But anyway, even though the fairgrounds are now locking up their gates overnight, we still manged to worm both mini and maxi (the truck and trailer) on for a 6:30-ish arrival. Since […]

July 20, 2025

OpsLog – LM&O (TT&TO) – 7/20/2025

‘m not sure if everyone is basking in the glow in the aftermath of ops, proud of how they managed to navigate the Byzantine rules of Time Table and Train Order, or still fuming in frustration and resentment. I will admit that it can be difficult, very much so, to do. However, on the plus side, you aren’t just spinning a knob and zipping a train under mother-may-I. And for a club to pull it off, well, that’s nothing short of amazing. We’ve done it various TT&TO formats before:full sets of clearance cards and orders, stapled together. Then the packets […]

August 10, 2025

OpsLog – OSMR – 8/9/2025

sister club to ours, the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders, decided they are going to give ops another try (they’d done it once but life got in the way). So Tom, one of our former members, scouted out our ops, took careful notes and carried them back to incorporate into their setting. And then he was nice enough to invite us over to run on the inaugural. I’ll mention that this was going to make for a long day for a number of our crew – we already had a planned session at our own club at 7pm. If we […]