Railroads

April 28, 2023

On Sheet – String Theory

e’ve talked all about simulating how trains run, how timetables are read and how TT&TO, Warrants, all those things work. But there you are in your layout room, looking at your yards and staging tracks, your passing sidings and goods yards, and you find yourself thinking, “So just how do I figure out a timetable in the first place?” The answer, my friend, are String Diagrams. From a posting or two blogs ago, an online friend noted that he uses a string diagram to run his railroad. I’ve even mentioned that I use something very much like a string diagram […]
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October 27, 2023

On Sheet – The Booby Prize

y Jewish grandmother once told me something (for the record, she really isn’t my biological grandmother but we’ve shared a close friendship for forty years). She said, simply, that Knowledge is the Booby Prize. It took me a number of years to understand what she meant by that. But as I get older, many of her observations become ever truer. Recently our club had the biggest operation session to date, detailed HERE. As noted, I had more trains than I knew what do do with. At one point I was just fleeting them over the summit, collecting them at the […]
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April 22, 2024

OpsLog – WAZU – 4/21/2024

guess it comes from bumming around the Netherlands for two weeks. Everywhere you go, you see trains zip past. And Central Station in Amsterdam has more rail traffic in and out that a Christmas tree layout. Every five minutes, a sleek blue train from the Dutch Railways bursts into the sunset, flying across fields and vaulting canals. And here, we just crashed a couple of trains at Folkston, GA, in what sounds like a complete stooges act of train safety. But those Dutch trains – poetry in motion. Look, for American railroading, Doc Andy likes creating fast lines. It’s Union […]
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