Train Blog
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 […]
January 12, 2026
o this is evening session of Zeus and my two-for-Thursday operations marathon. After finishing up wrecking the Virginia Southwestern, we raced up I-4 to get to Tom Wilson and our session on his Pittsburgh & West Virginia. This is a coal-hauling, steel-making layout with a heavily-traveled main line and long branch up to Mifflin and Clariton, all serving a gigantic mill complex. We were the first to arrive – found host Tom trying to string intercom cables like a sapper under artillery fire. When we couldn’t get it to work, I told him to just seat me at a tiny […]
January 12, 2026
convention was held in Cocoa this weekend – Protorails. While I couldn’t attend (I had a train show to manage in Deland over the weekend) I picked up a dispatcher request for two railroads hosting sessions for the con, both on the same day. So the first was the Virginia Southwestern, John Wilke’s fabulous coal hauler. And since it’s a dual line with shared trackage, I was able to weasel a second free pass for Zeus H, a young dispatcher I’ve sessioned with in the past. The only problem here was that he got stuck in the Amsterdam snow disaster […]
January 1, 2026
es, so this is it, my last session for 2025 (unless someone calls in the next few minutes and I’m grabbing my throttle bag and running for the car). Anyway, I thought about going over to the clubhouse and running a quick session by myself. But I opened the invitation up – looks like everyone else was busy and I got one guy – Shemp. But that’s fine. This is the thing. This year, I ran in room-packer club sessions with 30+ people all working in tight harmony to get through the simulated day. I ran on structured layouts that […]