tuscarora – Page 5 – Robert Raymond’s Blogtorium

July 19, 2024

OpsLog – TBL – 7/19/2024

t was an interesting way to pull together a session. I asked around but everyone was going on vacation. Then I thought I’d run solo Thursday after a cancer-status-check with my surgeon; he’s all the way down in Celebration (and for people who don’t know about that, well, given Interstate 4 traffic, that’s like saying “He’s on the other side of the D-Day invasion”). Then I thought, no, maybe I’ll just go to my local coffee shop and veg. Then young Zeus who is going off to school started in on me.It was all that “How about this day? How […]

September 9, 2024

OpsLog – TBL – 9/9/2024

he first perimeter defense, the outer gate, was wide open. It was almost like a trap. Cautious ingress. The second defense, the savanna out front, was similarly trespassed. While it was rumored to be the killing fields of several apex predators, the grass had been foolishly mown back, allowing perfect visibility. The final obstacle was the steel door. Even clearly marked – Members Only – the knob was loose, unlocked. There had to be a trap – ninja blades, kill lasers. It had been too easy. So, taking hold of her ten-year-old decoy, she shaved it through the door to […]

September 16, 2024

OpsLog – Tusk Coast – 9/15/2024

‘d just had a massive operation session the night before and hadn’t left the wind-down barroom post-brief until 1am. So why did I put myself back into the DS desk the very next day for another ops session, this time on ACL-flavored Tuscarora? Well, I’m easy. Far-away Student Zeus asked and I’m always willing to scrape up a session. So we had me on the DS panel, Greg on scheduled trains, Zeus on Coal, Zach as leverman and Mike on the station desk. So we were ready to go. The first half the session went well enough (better than the […]

October 20, 2024

OpsLog – TBL – 10/19/2024

nice summer day on the Tuscarora – an aspect we’ll mention a bit later. Greg and I were thinking of a two-man run but got enough interest to bump it up to six. Of course, I got there two hours early and set up in thirty minutes (why do I do this (because I’m usually freaking before ops, I’d wager)). But the guys all came out and were ready to run. I spent some of the down time explaining to the new guys how it worked (yes, this isn’t simply a tiny 2×4 foot train layout). But of course, they’d […]

January 1, 2025

OpsLog – TBL – 12/30/2024

y final blog post for the year, and a model train operations one. We just squeaked this in, last minute. Club president Shannon asked for a quiet little puzzler (he came to a six-person session in September and got smoked). So we slipped over to the club in the waning days of the year for a quiet little to-do. Since Shannon is building a lengthened version of this, he wants to see how the town of Tuscarora does business. When his layout is up, it’s going to put mine to shame. Anyway, running more like Greg and I did in […]

January 3, 2025

OpsLog – TC – 1/1/2025

o I’m standing under a post-midnight sky, brilliant with summer stars. Crickets are chirping. Bats flutter past. You might imagine I can smell dew-laden grass but no, my nose is numb from sulfuric diesel fumes, radiating from the fuel distributor Atlantic Coast Line uses to refuel engines out here in the ass end of nowhere. I’m pumping gallon after gallon into my Dash-9. Yes, the prior engineer was trying to look goody-goody to railroad management, running the Tidewater late to up his tonnage. He brought the unit in after midnight, on fumes, like a teenager with his dad’s car. I […]

February 2, 2025

OpsLog – TBL – 2/1/2025

ecided on this nice open weekend to head over to the club for a quiet solo run of the Tuscarora Branch Line. The wife came along to read in the back (that’s what she said, anyway) and Pete came out, and later, Mike. So that became a bit distracting. We were either talking or putting run-through, time-jump units on the line. I was trying to run the tower and the scheduled jobs (and didn’t do very well with either). JB and Pete took a mess of pictures. So yes, some blunders on my part. The worst goof was setting out […]

May 15, 2025

OpsLog – TBL – 5/14/2025

ecky was sitting in the back of her parents’ overloaded Buick, rolling out of some Pennsylvania backwoods town, Tuskawhosit or something. Her dad had to stop for directions (again). They were trying to find the town Becky’s mom’s sister lived in; Westly. Staying two weeks with her coal-mining relatives did not excite her at all. Mom: “They have a canoe.” Becky: “The river is sludge.” Mom: “You can watch all the trains.” Becky: “I hate trains.” Mom: “Look at the fall colors on the trees!” Becky: “…” They were just rumbling down the beat-up two lane road out of town, […]

August 3, 2025

OpsLog – TBL – 8/2/2025

nlike the last ops session I was at (which was, to no fault of the host, like a fight with cavalry lances in a shit house at midnight), the more compact, less attended session on the diminutive Tuscarora Branch Line was quite a success. I’d been planning on doing a test-run session since May (when we shut down the line to work on the river, almost done yet inexplicably not included in the accompanying photographs). Now that the river is mostly finished and looking somewhat better than plywood, we finally got a chance to use the layout in the way […]

August 19, 2025

OpsLog – Tusk Coast – 8/17/2025

t’s nice, after all the shit of last week, all the backstabbing pettiness, that Zeus took time off from between-classes time to push me to sponsor a session of Tusk Coast (Tuscarora with ACL equipment). This time, we figured that we’d add in the Interstate Railroad, running presumably on some sort of trackage rights, down from their lofty North Carolina peaks to the ACL mainline. What made maters more interesting was that it was our fourth new-version run of seasonal weather events – winter, specifically – and snow was forecast up in the high ridges above Westly. So to start, […]