Train Blog
March 1, 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 […]
February 26, 2026
ears ago, my father passed away at 4am at a local hospital. By 9am that morning, I was writing his obituary. “You’re the writer,” my family told me. Yes, so it’s a bit like that. It was a very stormy night on the railroad last night. Tempers high, expectations low, waits long, and on improperly aligned turnouts – shorts. There are a number of issues we had – most of them you know, some of them I don’t know, but yeah, let’s debrief it from my point of view. The dispatcher had a number of issues. First off: the east […]
February 22, 2026
n high craggy mountains lost in the mists of the grim Borderlands, old wizards practice the dark arts of Time Table & Train Order operations, demanding times of 1:1 (and perhaps slower), of steadfast observance of their Book of Lore (The Condensed Code of Operating Rules) and archaic rites to deny access of acolytes not established in their order. Their membership is secret, excursive and, frankly, dying. At a beat-up cinder block building in the rundown edge of Stupidville, a youngish group assembles to try TT&TO our way, with the clock buzzing at 8:1, with a lot of guys who aren’t quite […]
February 15, 2026
o here it is… Butt Monkey (noun) 1. An annoying and irksome person. 2. An object of abuse and ridicule. And on the Saint Valentines Day Massacre running of the West Virginia Northern, I got to be the session’s Butt Monkey. I’m not sure how this happened. Hey, in my years of blogging ops sessions, I’ve written about plenty of hapless butt monkeys, people who barge about in sessions, cluelessly delay others, lose their tempers or tell long-winded stories while I’m trying to mentally work out my switch moves. Some are such monkeys (either by personality or inability) that I […]
February 9, 2026
acksonville is our long-haul show (though someone is trying to get us to Savanna now). For “build day”, it’s out the door by 8am, on site by 11am, and build our line. And this time, build and take-down, we were a bit short staffed (by “a bit”, I mean the wives got pressed into service). But build it we did. After that, a couple of us took off for our tour of Jaxport (arranged by our own Mr. Terry – thanks for that). Great ride through the facility, and if you think it was only shipping containers, you are mistaken. […]
January 30, 2026
nother cozy little session on Smilin’ Jack’s Yosemite Valley Railroad, a neat little bedroom layout that simulates (sorta) SP operations in a California setting in an anytime (ninties?) period. John L and I have run with Jack several times in the past. The most notable thing about our growing abilities is our comfort with the timetable itself. The first time we ran, it was a lot of “now what do I do?” and “what’s next?”. Now, a couple of sessions in, we’ve learned the timetable. A long freight comes in. It is broken into three locals in the yard. These […]
January 30, 2026
funny thing happened on the way to the slag pit. I found a long string of cars at the coke byproducts cutoff, fouling the spur. By the time I pulled that cut out of the way and hustled my pots to the pit and dumped them, they rolled down the hill like a couple of half-wrecking balls, bouncing through the midnight darkness. Cooled hard. So I’ll probably hear about that. That’s the sort of night it was. It started with me trying to run 927 (the Zanesville turn) trying to run against heavy eastbound traffic under a newbie dispatcher. I […]
January 25, 2026
ead Actor (glancing through the curtain at a packed hall): “This will be the greatest production of Romeo & Juliet the stage has ever seen!” House manager: “Your lead actress called in sick and there is no understudy.” Lead Actor: “Gack!” So this Saturday Night Special, we had a lot of pre-signups. I was in the back getting the clock, my computer, and my trainee ready, going over everything while writing the pre-warrants. See, there is a trick to the opening moves on the LM&O. Basically, there is a freight and passenger train coming out of Cincinnati (possibly followed by coal […]
January 18, 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 […]
January 13, 2026
ur report actually begins a day earlier. Our club has recently dipped our rail joiners into T-Trak. It’s very easy and popular (and a hell of a lot simpler than them wooden Trojan horses we built in our N-Trak days). So the evening pre-show, Shannon and Zeus (two n-trak knuckleheads) were out at the fairgrounds setting up. It went together pretty easy (even though there was a case of elevated curves being installed backwards, turning them into escape-velocity curves). But the new layout was pretty much up and running in time for the show. That being said, the show went […]