Train Blog
August 24, 2025
hen you die and Saint Peter says to you, “Hey, when were you happiest down there?” You’re gonna say, “Well, it was okay the day I got married, and I didn’t much mind the day I first fell in love. But seein’ the sky with the Great Waldo Pepper, that beats ’em all.” -The Great Waldo Pepper (1975) Personally, my own end-life reflections would turn to all the many moments model trains and their operations have given me. There have been soaring successes and comical pratfalls. And here’s a new one: I’m standing out in the back yard of Ken […]
August 19, 2025
t’s nice, after all the shit of last week, all the backstabbing pettiness, that Zeus took time off from between-classes time to push me to sponsor a session of Tusk Coast (Tuscarora with ACL equipment). This time, we figured that we’d add in the Interstate Railroad, running presumably on some sort of trackage rights, down from their lofty North Carolina peaks to the ACL mainline. What made maters more interesting was that it was our fourth new-version run of seasonal weather events – winter, specifically – and snow was forecast up in the high ridges above Westly. So to start, […]
August 11, 2025
he only real problem of engaging in two operation sessions (one with the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders) and the second a Saturday Night Session, is the number of husband points it costs me (just wrote a check for 500,000 points). But it was worth it. I wasn’t sure how many we’d get for a standard session on a Saturday night. A lot of us were still dragging from the three-and-a-half hour session we’d just gotten through. So there we were at Culvers, sucking down food and rebuilding our energy. And to my amazement, more members came, and more, until […]
August 10, 2025
sister club to ours, the Orlando Society of Model Railroaders, decided they are going to give ops another try (they’d done it once but life got in the way). So Tom, one of our former members, scouted out our ops, took careful notes and carried them back to incorporate into their setting. And then he was nice enough to invite us over to run on the inaugural. I’ll mention that this was going to make for a long day for a number of our crew – we already had a planned session at our own club at 7pm. If we […]
August 8, 2025
was at a Volkswagen-sponsored driving event (this is before they cheated on their EPA numbers (incomprehensible if they were ISO9000-orientated) and before my Volkswagon neo-beetle (1) plastic-rotted and (b) caught fire). Anyway, it was all about helpful high performance driving hints. Yeah, I did learn how to corner much better, how to brake-first then turn, all that. But the most important moment for me was in an event where a row of us sat in front of a light. Simple deal – light goes red, slap the button in front of you. And I had this nailed. Even though I […]
August 3, 2025
fter a hiatus, I’m back. I won’t be regular or kind (hey, that’s the mark of being old, right?). But I will use this for my soap box on model trains and their operations. So, a lot of you think running toy trains is fun (regardless of the fact that we call it “Operations” and say it with a clenched jaw). And fine, if you like snapping together unitrak into a double loop with the requisite double-crossover, go right ahead. No police force is going to break into your hobby room and carry you off (not quite yet). It’s your […]
August 3, 2025
nlike the last ops session I was at (which was, to no fault of the host, like a fight with cavalry lances in a shit house at midnight), the more compact, less attended session on the diminutive Tuscarora Branch Line was quite a success. I’d been planning on doing a test-run session since May (when we shut down the line to work on the river, almost done yet inexplicably not included in the accompanying photographs). Now that the river is mostly finished and looking somewhat better than plywood, we finally got a chance to use the layout in the way […]
July 28, 2025
ne of the rockier sessions on the WAZU, still mostly on time but with rage and thunder to get us there. I still had fun, as did most of the other operators. Andy always puts on a good show and great lunch – I eat better than at home. I had the dispatcher’s seat (third time in a week) and the session started out well. Trains were rolling on their times and making their stops. Andy’s new system of posted turnout IDs made it easy to get the remote trains across the line (still, I was only diverging them when […]
July 28, 2025
ne of my favorite runs – the Florida East Coast. And funny anecdote – I’d been dispatching so much recently (twice this week already) that when I wrote Ken and asked if maybe I could just run trains this time, he quickly agreed, making me double-think it. Was I not that good? Did I do something wrong last time? Why doesn’t he beg me to run the panel? Turns out he wanted to run a more intimate session (not with candles and romantic music and a valentine chocolate box, no, but with only five engineers in the room. He’d generated […]
July 24, 2025
ell, that was satisfying. We got out a solid session last night. Everyone knew what to do to set up. Pre-brief was quick. The clock started and (I’m happy to say) we didn’t get a single LNER (not an English railroad company but a line error on the clock when the system shorts hard). Outside of one helix delay, everything ran fairly smooth. I don’t know about you lugs, but I had a pretty enjoyable time. A couple of real notable events. I didn’t get ANY calls for help to the dispatcher over the radio. Crews really did “work it […]