orlando

ead Actor (glancing through the curtain at a packed hall): “This will be the greatest production of Romeo & Juliet the stage has ever seen!” House manager: “Your lead actress called in sick and there is no understudy.” Lead Actor: “Gack!” So this Saturday Night Special, we had a lot of pre-signups. I was in the back getting the clock, my computer, and my trainee ready, going over everything while writing the pre-warrants. See, there is a trick to the opening moves on the LM&O. Basically, there is a freight and passenger train coming out of Cincinnati (possibly followed by coal […]

funny thing happened on the way to the slag pit. I found a long string of cars at the coke byproducts cutoff, fouling the spur. By the time I pulled that cut out of the way and hustled my pots to the pit and dumped them, they rolled down the hill like a couple of half-wrecking balls, bouncing through the midnight darkness. Cooled hard. So I’ll probably hear about that. That’s the sort of night it was. It started with me trying to run 927 (the Zanesville turn) trying to run against heavy eastbound traffic under a newbie dispatcher. I […]

ears ago, my father passed away at 4am at a local hospital. By 9am that morning, I was writing his obituary. “You’re the writer,” my family told me. Yes, so it’s a bit like that. It was a very stormy night on the railroad last night. Tempers high, expectations low, waits long, and on improperly aligned turnouts – shorts. There are a number of issues we had – most of them you know, some of them I don’t know, but yeah, let’s debrief it from my point of view. The dispatcher had a number of issues. First off: the east […]