railroad – Page 2 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

February 28, 2021

OpsLog – WBRR – 2/27/2021

his kinda came up from my editing of The Journal Box. Got to looking at Al Sohl’s pictures and missed seeing his layout after a year of quarantining. Wanted to show the wife the Room ‘o Rockies and wrangled a visit for me and my wife. We showed up and the next thing I knew, Al was starting up a mini-session. Disclaimer: I knew he was going to do this but didn’t tell the wife, lest she chicken out. And so this is how I ended up rolling out of Denver with a full head of steam on 124, heading […]

March 14, 2021

OpsLog – WAZU – 3/14/2021

fter a long time away from the Pacific NorthWest, a small crew was able to return to the WAZU RR (I still don’t know what it stands for), Doc Andy’s heavy power line between Spokane and Portland. It’s been possibly more than a year since we last ran. Even with that time, the doc’s railroad ran flawlessly. I dispatched with more camera angles than a medium security prison. But I really didn’t need them – with long runs and plenty of sidings I could get everyone past everyone else with a minimum of wait and fuss (though we did have […]

April 29, 2021

Railroad Paperwork (DOG EAR)

ne of the side uses of my site is recording model railroad ops session. To explain, I’m a member of a huge model railroad club. Once a month we run trains like a real railroad. Dispatchers. Orders. Paperwork. Switching. All that fun railroad stuff. And early on in the Blogatorium I started writing my accounts of each session, everything from my small 2×4 foot microlayout to the sprawling La Mesa club in San Diego’s Balboa Park. It’s fun to “yarn” about things that happen, all the goofs, fubars and accidents. What is funny is how much this has become a […]

June 27, 2021

OpsLog – FEC – 6/26/2021

f you wanted to find the last OpsLog on the Florida East Coast, you’d have to go back over a year ago. That’s how long it’s been, the entire span of the pandemic. Still, the session was one of the strictest I’ve seen. Temperature checks. Vaccination records. Full masks. And I respect that (with the new variant filling ICUs again). In fact, on the way to the session we stopped at Wendy’s for lunch. Wore our masks in the line. Sat down in the corner. But then an extended family of unmasked tire-biters sat a table away and we finished […]

September 23, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 09/22/2021

feel like the guy the moment after a sledge hammer hits him in the forehead. Or he is hit with two bullets. Silver Bullets. The session started out well enough. I wrote up some warrants early on – neat meet in Zanesville, with the local coming west and ducking into the industrial trackage, 202 coming east (and taking the siding) and Silver Bullet 2 running down the main. That went down like clock work. Out east, 223 was into Calypso and the Harris Glen Local was already climbing the grade. Everything was going as planned. I actually thought maybe we’d […]

October 28, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 10/28/2021

eft-seating it in a pair of beat up old C&NW units, rattling down through the spiral tunnel below Harris Glen, running to Lehigh and a possible meet. I’m conducting for a young scout, Aryon. The kid’s got a steady throttle hand and is drifting the helpers down to Calypso nice and easy. The club’s full of people tonight – visitors, a group of boy scouts, lots of people. Most of them have been put on trains as engineers, the guys giving up their throttles to allow newbies to realize that trains are more than just circles of tracks. Trains are […]

November 25, 2021

OpsLog – LM&O – 11/24/2021

ow that was depressing. It’s my birthday. My wife is in the hospital for observation for her dicky heart. I need something to take my mind off everything. It’s ops night! Great! Nobody showed. Honest, our other pre-Thanskgiving events were always well-attended. Everyone stayed late because it was a holiday tomorrow. But this time some people had to work, some people were traveling, and some people took the cheap way out and had passed away. We had six guys running the layout on their own. So no dispatcher and not a lot of chatter. We ran two freight trains, a […]

February 24, 2022

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/23/2022

don’t know why it is. I’m like a symphony conductor who has directed a piece hundreds of times and still feels like he needs to throw up into the tuba section right before the performance commences. I always get uptight before a session, even if it’s only the club. But club ops are a big deal. We have a lot of people who only come out for the ops. And tonight showed why that was. We shined tonight. We had a bunch of guests and a lot of members ready to run. I was actually amazed at the traffic – […]

April 25, 2022

OpsLog – WAZU – 4/22/2022

t’s always good to see a layout progress from session to session. And today’s running of the WAZU railroad (a reference I’m not sure anyone gets) was no exception. Last session was good; this one was better. We have to applaud the efforts of Doc and Sparky, who personally made operations improvement goal one. In this, they reworked the card system in the yards (including making sure everything was pre-staged and the yards carried reduced car loads (a mistake a lot of modelers make)). Also, the turnout controls were reconfigured with led to a lot less fumbling for switch throws. […]

September 16, 2022

On Sheet – Famous Quotes

n this edition of On Sheet, I’d like to list some of the best quotes I’ve heard during my years of operating on model railroads across the United States. While putting together this collection, I found myself smiling. Let’s see if I can give you a smile with some of these… “That’s why they put windows on the front of engines.” – At the club years ago, I remember an engineer running over an incorrect turnout, derailing, and complaining he hadn’t noticed the alignment. This was an overheard response. “Did you even read the orders you issued?” – In the […]