Train Blog
March 24, 2023
his isn’t really a bit on ops, but on scenery, model railroading, and weird coincidences. So I was getting ready to put my one paved road on the Tuscarora. It was to run from an N-scale scene in the front, across a grade crossing (engineers will be expected to sound warning the first time through, then a crossing guard takes over) and then drop down to Z-scale (where appropriate buildings are tucked into a tight wooded valley). That was the plan. I got the grade crossing in okay. For the road, I looked at a lot of ideas online and […]
March 23, 2023
kay, let’s break down the disasters into two primary events. The Dispatcher Panel: There is a bug somewhere (I think it comes from double-clicking someplace you shouldn’t). It crashes the program. I never see it. Bob Martin used to get it maybe once in every other session. Cub dispatcher Steve got it about five times tonight. That meant we had to reset the board and try to remember where the trains were. It also threw off Steve’s careful lineup of warrants (he’d figured the first four hours of issued warrants before the session started). But then again, no plan survives […]
March 20, 2023
ith a combination of sweet-talking and blackmail, I managed to get Kyle to take the DS seat on the WAZU Line and fly into the maelstrom of mother-may-I, controlling the sprawling, confusing, and statically-cracking division. Me, I got to run trains (which I do every couple of months). So, with my new-found freedom, I busted out of Hinkle Yard (four fast-minutes early; you’d think Yardmaster Sparky was having a baby; such screaming). It was a quick run to Umatilla and after some quick switching, a quicker run down to Walla Walla. And that was fun – a long siding with […]
March 18, 2023
y order of the dispatcher, I’d dismounted from my CSX switch engine and walked down the industrial siding. A flat car was being worked by a crew off a remote loading dock. Then an off-spot box car. And then the center of the crisis, an industrial loading dock. At it sat a boxcar and a reefer, the latter’s refrigerator engine running with nobody home to unload it. The Brotherhood of Knuckledraggers 107 had walked off the job. And worried about the time this car could run off it’s internal tanks, the railroad had set me down to check it out. […]
March 17, 2023
‘ve recently seen some fusses online about small layout designs. While some critique should always be welcome, criticism shouldn’t be. I’m a big proponent of small layouts. Sure, if your house is located on an division-sized bomb shelter, you can afford to throw out your minimum radii and ladder-lengths. But for the rest of us, it’s all about cramming as much railroad as we can in a tight space. In a sense, it is an art form. Anyone can do the Sistine Chapel with a roller-brush and a Sherman-Williams account. But doing a Wedgewood portrait pin takes a certain attention […]
March 13, 2023
ne of my little model railroad observation is that if you host a session with ten operators and ten things go wrong, each operator might have one problem and see it as successful, but the host sees all ten (and commits suicide afterwards). Well, today I rather disproved that witticism. I was in the cab of my usual run, the Sand & Lumber job, a four-movement effort that gets empty flats and loaded hoppers down to Staffordtown, where they get switched out for empty hoppers and full flats. I’ve always enjoyed this job. Interestingly, there is a reefer run I’m […]
March 10, 2023
read this little passage a while ago. It came from a little anecdote in a book on Southern Pacific depots in the 1950s. …I was busy with these customers when the annunciator sounded, indicating a westbound train was approaching… I’d never heard of such a thing. It seems that, in the fifties, there was some sort of relay switch to automatically ring a station when a train was inbound. Interesting. I filed it away and didn’t give it too much thought. Then we went into that piece from two weeks ago where I admitted my layout was more CTC than […]
March 9, 2023
t was an interesting session at the club tonight. Since my goatee glue isn’t dry yet and excessive talking might make it fall into my lap (dire consistences abound), I turned the dispatcher job over to young Jason (I still worked the computer display and reviewed all outbound warrants for correctness and homicidal omissions). But he did pretty good – once I get him checked out on the panel, I’ll cup him like a little bird and let him fly, fly, fly… …and I can imagine the other members loading birdshot. But overall, Jason did fine. We did have a […]
March 3, 2023
ince this is a blog about model train operations, I’m going to talk about time (since railroads and time, historically and modeled, are intertwined). Railroads live and die on the clock. Railroad operations are why we have standardized time zones today. You can’t run massive equipment in a delicately-balanced orchestration of time and place if every town consults its rusty clock tower for the local time. It needs to be standardized. Now, I’ve blogged about time before, HERE. This was an answer for those people who think that clocks equal stress and stress is no fun. If you can run […]
February 27, 2023
n Amtrak train drifts up to a weatherstained industrial structures. Down its flanks, the doors bang open. For a moment, silence. Then, the passengers of ill-fated Train 22 drift out onto the broken concrete loading dock outside the shuttered factory. They cannot find their conductor. All the attendants have vanished. The engine idles, driverless and abandoned. There are no answers. As night falls, various groups of passengers drift off, seeking help and civilization. Some are picked off by drug-addicted homeless grungers. Others are eaten by mooses. Carnivorous deer pick off a few. One surprised passenger is killed by Big Foot. […]