Railway

December 15, 2019

The San Diego and Arizona Railway (Review)

ou might have seen, HERE and HERE and HERE, all about my trip to La Mesa Club in San Diego to run operations circa 1951 on a huge HO scale railroad. While there, I often find myself with an hour or so of downtime before the next train. Often I’ll wander the other layouts of the museum (at night, it’s both quiet and spooky) and look around. Two of them (one HO, one N) have this crazy-high elbow trestle over a Mars-like gorge, with the tracks receding along ledges and pop-tunnels. Quite an amazing scene. It was only on my […]
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November 13, 2022

The Classic Railway Signal Tower (Review)

od, I wish I’d had this book before programming TUSK tower, my computer-driven interlocking tower on my Tuscarora Branch Line railroad. More on that in a bit. So, Interlocking Towers are those control-tower-looking-structures you used to see along railroad lines. They came about because sending crews scrambling about in the middle of the night, in the rain, to align a route for the express sometimes ended up with hard feelings and smoldering causalities. Interlocking Towers were the computers of their era (from the 1880s to the 1960s). The operator, standing in his high perch, would use long levers to set […]
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March 29, 2024

On Sheet – An English (and all over) Dispatching Game

ell, last week I turned up an interesting CTC game for you, free. This week, I found an even more involved dispatching game if you wish to test your merits and see what it’s like to dispatch when there is no model railroad about. Railway Operation Simulator is an interesting bit of freeware that you can pick up HERE. This is more like the old dispatching program that a company named Signal produced years back, where it provides a base for user railroads created with an editor. Looks kinda like this… The divisions you can control are put together by […]
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