Railroader’s – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 19, 2020

Coal Railroading (Review)

ven though I model the Southern Pacific in the Central California Valley, I’ve been thinking of making a smaller “fun” layout, one I can fire up casually and run without trouble. You can see more about that decision (and the plans) HERE. But in a nutshell, I’m moving my action to Western Pennsylvania (in the made-up town of Tuscarora). I’m going to be running a very short line with coal getting hauled to a powerplant, with local switching and even a tower operator (big plans for a small space). So we’ll see how this comes out. While picking up preliminary […]

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 […]

January 18, 2026

OpsLog – OSMR – 1/17/2026

ears back, I used to ride by bike over to Dick Sturm’s house to either work on his layout or run ops. It wasn’t a long ride, about two miles if that, but it was nice to ride home on cold winter nights after playing with trains. Anyway, wiggled an invite with the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders for a Saturday session and decided to ride over – this time the ride was seven and change, with the worst part on their end (a quarter mile on Aloma sidewalks, with all sorts of traffic. Anyway, made it there safely and they […]

March 1, 2026

OpsLog – OSMR – 2/28/2026

e picked up an invite from our sister (half-sister, given it’s “half-O”) clubs, the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders, for an ops session. They still want to learn from us (which is odd, given the hash we made of our last session). But no, an open invite, and I was pleased at our turnout – we were (just looking) half the crews. We had myself, Kyle, Phil, Terry (in club grays, looking so team-spirited), Mike (in club-heritage black) and Pete (in some sort of black shirt I think he got off a dead ninja (I’m assuming that Friday night at […]