Train Blog
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 […]
July 20, 2025
‘m not sure if everyone is basking in the glow in the aftermath of ops, proud of how they managed to navigate the Byzantine rules of Time Table and Train Order, or still fuming in frustration and resentment. I will admit that it can be difficult, very much so, to do. However, on the plus side, you aren’t just spinning a knob and zipping a train under mother-may-I. And for a club to pull it off, well, that’s nothing short of amazing. We’ve done it various TT&TO formats before:full sets of clearance cards and orders, stapled together. Then the packets […]
July 13, 2025
ig one-day show for us over in Deland, make quite exciting because I’d be show boss and Old Man Raiford would not be around for set up. Had a new driver, Leonard, who took away any concerns on my part by moving the trailer around like a seasoned switch crew with a boxcar (though that plastic parking post was a little worse for wear after we went through). But anyway, even though the fairgrounds are now locking up their gates overnight, we still manged to worm both mini and maxi (the truck and trailer) on for a 6:30-ish arrival. Since […]
June 29, 2025
aybe I’m expecting too much from my hobby of operations? Don’t know. The last few haven’t been so hot. And for this session, it’s not the fault of the Farnhams (no, it falls pretty much on the operators but a bit on the weather, too) but the June run of the Florida East Coast was a tough session. How tough? Got home by 8pm and fell into bed to “read” and crashed for nine hours solid (would have been ten, but the cats demanded their due (i.e. food)). So what went wrong? Well, we knew going in that the Market […]