Train Blog
January 3, 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 […]
January 1, 2025
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 […]
December 23, 2024
o last week I had RSV (now everyone who knows me and was around me is giving me the stink eye). Felt pretty bad at the high water mark (lung water, that is). So now I’m in the recovery mode but the doctor who saw me in the ER said if I don’t get better in a day or so, I gotta come back to avoid it turning into Pneumonia. Well, shit. But I think I developed a sure-fire cure. First, go to a doctors clinic (well, Doc Andy is a veterinarian, but a damn good one). Makes sure […]
December 20, 2024
really wanted to run trains on this eighteenth of December session. At our Just Run Trains session, I’d run the MT ores over the hill. Having heard so many sad epics of problems, I wanted to see if they were as troublesome of trucks as I’d been told. Also, since Leonard and Zeus were splitting the dispatching, I finally could be out on the road. And since I was recovering from a flu, I would wear a mask. There are too many crews who would be looking for the “Dispatcher in the Roundhouse” and administer a beat down if given […]
December 17, 2024
‘m down in a dark low place, a plywood and benchwork cavern under the hills between Darby and Elkview, looking for reefer cars off my Pacific Fruit Express run which was turned into tossed salad by a miss-thrown turnout. Several cars were derailed in the tunnel and one had hit the floor. On my knees in the dusty dark, it was then that I saw it. Tucked in the corner opposite me, under the town of Harris, the dull ivory of ancient bones amid a scattering of Indian war bonnets, rusting tomahawks and flint arrowheads. It was an Indian burial […]
December 9, 2024
nother biannual jaunt down to Port Saint Lucie to run on Al Sohl’s magnificent Western Bay (a DRGW narrow gauge line that will make your eyeballs hurt, the scenery so vast and, well, western). We had a contingent foursome of operators: myself, studious John L, personable Jim M (the padre), and Terry B (a newbie who seems interested in operations, has survived two club beatings and is game to try other lines). Terry and I had ridden east to the Holiday Inn marshaling yard, and I was gratified to learn that he was aware of Time Table & Train Order […]
December 2, 2024
here are things I’m thankful for. For example, I’m thankful they detected the cancer before it hit a nearby nerve and spread through my body. And I’m thankful that when my ultralight engine failed on a steep takeoff within five hours of soloing, I didn’t panic – stick forward, get speed back, and glide down to the lake to kiss it with my pontoons. But my latest thanks goes to the fact that I didn’t push to run the Highland Line under TT&TO. Talk about a narrow shave with death. Up in the tower, I had my hands full. Host […]
November 30, 2024
t’s taken a long way to get here. Our HO B&O Chicago Terminal layout was promised to be a major attention-getter at our club, drawing a huge wave of HO guys into our membership. But then the clique lost enthusiasm and quit, leaving us with our own version of the I-4 eyesore, a big expensive thing nobody knew what to do with. Jim T worked on it, adding industries (possibly too many industries) to the line. Bob K helped him with scenery. But that ended with us having (for all practical purposes) a very long engine test track. Again, interest […]
November 28, 2024
s usual, we are never sure how many people will come out for a night-before-Thanksgiving session. We’ve always underestimated our turnout. And this year, as in years past, you’ve shown up just how much you dislike your family and relatives by coming out for a good night of full ops. And as always, we are glad to have you. As John C’s photo shows below, we had a large number of club members (plus a couple of friends and family, a guest or two, and even our favorite den-mom) to run with us. So our overall perspective from the dispatchers’ […]
November 24, 2024
consideration I’d never had before – the environment of your train room. When I was fifteen or so (and since it is my birthday today and I am sixty-six, that was effing fifty-one years ago), my dad and I built a moderately large HO layout in our Cincinnati basement. In the winter, the floors and walls were icy and the air cave-cold. I remember crawling under the layout to wire (thanks, Dad. I see your guile only now) on the stone-chilled floor, my joints stiff and my hands, ass and knees numb. So yes, your environment means a lot. Recently […]