Train Blog
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 […]
November 17, 2024
ell, you can’t spell “Shenanigans” without “Shannon”. And, it seems, you can’t spell “Dumbass” and “Dipwad” and even “Wackadoodle” without him, too. I’d really overbooked Saturday. I agreed to run on the Virginia Southwestern earlier that day, but the club was having a Saturday Night Special session that evening. I’d asked at the business meeting if we could maybe, you know, skip it but too many people wanted it. I even considered not going but Shannon sweet-talked/blackmailed me into doing it. So, spending thousands of husband points and possibly fatiguing a year or more off my life, I agreed to […]
November 17, 2024
his wasn’t my best idea – going over to Polk City to run the Virginia Southwestern when I also had a Saturday Night Ops session at the club later. So I’d be dispatching for, let’s see, eight hours (and on the road for three). And all that model railroading and I wouldn’t touch a throttle. Still, I do enjoy dispatching. We approached the VSW with the same caution that sappers would an unexploded bomb. Last time on this railroad, everything blew up and the session ended with a critical staging area dead. The only reason we were able to run […]
November 11, 2024
f you are thinking that you already got posted from me this weekend for a Saturday show, you did. But now it’s Sunday and a big bunch of us train-freaks are over at Doc Andy’s, running on the WAZU. For once, I didn’t jump for the DS panel. One, I wanted to run some trains for once and two, some of my friends were going to need my burly brawn assistance to get an old lady up some stairs. Since I was on a short leash that day, I chose to run trains and see how it would play out. […]
November 10, 2024
o this is what an easy train show is like. Instead of getting up at 5am and running out to Deland to build our layout in the dark, then walk around it all day, with this show at Lake Nona Middle School we were able to go out on Friday and casually put things together. The next day, it was a leisurely local drive out. The layout was already up and ready – we just put trains on and ran. We had a lot of help this time around, with new members wearing their bright yellow bullseye shirts and really […]
October 24, 2024
t seems like the trope of railroad fiction; a moment where the high railroad summit is packed with trains and the grizzled dispatcher has to ask a young cub engineer to pull off a move that, if it fails, will lock up the railroad for hours. And that is exactly how it went down. At the 2/3rds point, I had traffic building in Red Rock and Lehigh, the summit approaches. They were pretty plugged. To get trains out, I needed to run a bunch over the hill. To clear Red Rock for westbound moves, I needed to get Jude’s long […]
October 20, 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 […]