Train Blog
December 8, 2025
fter a night of jittery half-sleep at a hotel (and, like, who thought it was a good thing to hang neon lighting along the outer window frame of a hotel room? Is this the newer version of a flashing “HOTEL” sign?), I had a nice breakfast and headed over to the museum site near the Miami Zoo. Got there early and eventually they opened the gate for the site and I went in. The railroad museum here is impressive – there was once an airship hanger here. Now it’s an open train shed with all manner of equipment here, including […]
December 8, 2025
eus is a good friend. Several times, we have joint dispatched (and no, that does not mean we destroyed doobies together). So when he called and asked if I’d bring our West Fork switching puzzle (a.k.a. Inglenook) down the South Miami for Miami Railfest, I said “Yes”. See, that’s one of my few faults. I say “Yes” without thinking. Another fault is when I give my word, I stick to it. This is because, sure, I was up in Port St Lucie, running the Western Bay on Saturday, and he needed me on Sunday. Port St Lucie should be right […]
December 8, 2025
o the usual way this works is that I come to a layout, the owner surrenders it to me, and I dispatch. Yeah, he might have paid for it and built it, but I’m the guy who runs it. With Al, with his literal and archaic perception of ‘ownership’, that can cause issues. But this time, I would not be dispatching. He had a visitor who, I believe, was working on AP hours. Since Reverend Jim was off with grandkids (which I view as a character flaw), I was bumped down to station operator in charge of Navajo, Dulce, Placerville […]
November 27, 2025
ecently we ran out pre-Thanksgiving operation session, a chance to escape the ravages of relatives, and to have fun running trains before having to listen to your drunk uncle explain why the Earth is flat over the ruins of the feast. We had a pretty good crowd for it – not the usual pre-turkey-packer because of last-minute cancellations, but it was still enough to run all that needs-to be-ran and have fun with all that can be fun. But in flying over the confusion in my dispatchocopter, I realized how much I have to be thankful for. To wit- Thankful […]
November 25, 2025
o I’m sitting in my office in the back of Bank Tower, writing out train orders. It was just after 7am and the Bristol Local was calling for paper out. I wrote him a simple “Run Extra” order. Then I got the call from the station operator at Waterbury that he’d departed (i.e. I peeked over there). Okay, so sure. Grinchy grin on my face, darkness in my heart, all that. He got about a mile down the tracks and met (cowcatcher to cowcatcher) the first westbound passenger train of the day. So, emergency stopping or smoldering bodies scattered down […]
November 24, 2025
ne must be careful of what one writes… and who one gives it to. –Cardinal Richelieu, The Three Musketeers (1973) So I learned about that on my last OpsLog, where a friend fed my blog through ChatGPT, told it to regurgitate it in its own words and spin it to the negative. Cute. All I can say was that I got an invite to the wonderful Florida East Coast and you, my warmest associate, did not. So consider that and reflect with new-found wisdom. So yes, we did get a nice run over at this fine Palm Bay layout (which, […]
November 19, 2025
n fantasy novels (and some religions), great events are triggered following prophetic signs in the sky. And so there I was, waiting at the clubhouse’s grassy parking lot for Kyle for a ride out to the Komar’s in Tampa for their hosting of the West Virginia Northern, looking up to see a Chinese rocket booster slowly burning up as it crossed the sky, glowing white and emerald, dropping away to the east. So that’s a differing sort of start at least. So we three wise men (myself, Kyle and Bruce) journeyed across the desolation of Interstate 4, making out way […]
November 17, 2025
ot going to say I was nervous – no, perhaps a little concerned. Doc Andy’s session on the WAZU was coming up and for some reason I asked my wife if she’d like to run with us. So the only way this would work was if she could run one of the remote trains in the other room, sitting at a desk with a forward camera car view and a bank of monitors of the train room up on the wall. This was better than the moshpit layout room, where you feel like you are jammed inside a rush hour […]
November 16, 2025
adn’t run Tuscarora (my microlayout) for some time so I announced I’d be at the clubhouse Saturday and figured I’d run the railroad on my own. That being the case, I got out all the cars I hadn’t fully tested (or struggled with in the past) set up and cleaned it, and got ready for action. Had an extra gondola car (dropped by the midnight eastbound) to spot over at the brewery and two coal hoppers deadheading about, so my session was going to be busy. The first two “scale” hours were pretty slow. Not only was I having to […]
November 6, 2025
here were two great things that happened on Tuesday, November 4th. I had a very pleasant drive out the Cocoa Beach, Florida. Plenty of time, Micky-D lunch with a book, even a McFlurry. Got to Jack F’s house a bit early so I walked around the park until the ops session start time and then I showed up. And the second thing was that, when we started the session on the Yosemite Valley RR and John L was bringing the first train from offroad, I realized I was now familiar with the railroad to anticipate how the yard works (yes, […]