Train Blog
August 29, 2019
should have known this was going to be one of those nights. I needed to clear the boosters. I needed to swap out a dicky phone. One of the clocks was fussing with the master and took a couple of tries to reset. Two people came after me (literally) with blood in their eyes about their waybills. And for some reason the overhead speaker wasn’t active (and when I did activate it, nobody thought I was asking them, specifically, to confirm a radio check). It was a relief to go clock hot. It was one of the busiest nights I […]
August 25, 2019
ince the dispatcher’s seat was filled with a trainee (Doug, who did a damn good job out of the chute) and the yard was filled with the Lady’s Quilting and Trim/Classification Club, I was out on the road again. And there’s no time like waiting at a red board to wax philosophic on the meanings or life and model railroading. To wit – the puzzle of industrial switching on the standard out-n-back turn. When you run one of these jobs, switching your way through a set of towns along the mainline, it begins to feel like an intelligence test. So […]
August 19, 2019
oing some final switching in the Longwood yard. Got my buddy Greg back in the caboose, going through the waybills and trying to figure how to block this local. We’re shuffling in the yard throat with one eye down those long paired rails that follow the slow rises and falls of the marshy ground through a cave of cyprus trees. The L&S runs on a very simple operations principle – don’t crash. And we’ve got a train overdue. It’s been (by my quick flip back through the blogs) four years since the last time we ran on this Southern division. […]
July 28, 2019
First item: Let the record reflect that the author, known herein as Robert Raymond, has operated three times this week. Second Item: Let the record also reflect that having a kiddy birthday party/ops session for hyperactive nine year olds is probably not a good idea. hat business out of the way, let us begin. And yes, we began as part of a birthday party. Nice that I got pizza and coke and a cute engineer’s hat, but I also got a local off the bat, working a busy section of mainline, with other mother/child teams pushing out of Portland and […]
July 28, 2019
ou might remember our last jaunt on the FEC which ended prematurely (possibly due to your author bumping a scrap piece of rail down into the electronic guts of the Farnham Calculation Engine). The superintendent decided that this session would be finished with the same cast of characters that smoked his railroad the month before. So, no crew call, more like a summons. We all returned to the scene of the crime where we were all given our jobs from the precise moment we’d gone dark. Everything was as it was. I slid into the dispatchers chair, looked at all those […]
July 25, 2019
am in the waning days of my career, but I’m still needed it seems. Had a kid in my team who has spent two days inert because the people he needs in another team are out of the office. Finally he came in today and I marched him right down to their manager (whom I’m friends with). Tossed some intros, told her about our missing SMEs, asked for help. She smiled. “Oh, yeah, I can get someone on that right away.” Problem solved. Deadlock broken. I’m pretty proud of my problem-solving abilities, and it stuck with me tonight as I […]
July 14, 2019
otta admit, this was the weekend from hell. This train show, starting at 5am to head in for setup. And once it was through, I was looking forward to a run to the airport to pick up a friend’s wife, then three hours of sleep before heading in for my final corporate load (which was a disaster in itself). So, yes, stuff was stacking up. I’m not going to take this out on the show. Yeah, we only had three people for set up (that’s going to come up in our next meeting) and we put the legs on in […]
June 27, 2019
isitors usually set me off. When I’m running with a visitor, I see our layout through their eyes. Instead of just focusing on my little job, I look over all the peninsulas, all the moving trains, all the jobs getting done. What we’ve done is amazing, and to see it working is just phenomenal. Tonight’s session was a hot one. We ran up through our 1000th warrant (which means the count rolls back down). Matthew was back on the panel, keeping things moving. We had Nick doing top-notch service in Martin. And all over the layout, people were pushing into […]
June 23, 2019
t happens – we were in mid-ops on Ken Farnham’s fine Florida East Coast. I was dispatching, had three trains southbound trains moving towards Palm Bay. The local was out of the way. Another one was done early and could run home. JB was working the yard with a team that was having a good time. The other shed was packed with engineers. And then the layout shut down. There was a short and every attempt made to fix it blew yet another fuse. It happens. I’ve had my own Cuesta Grade conk out. Our club layout, the LM&O, has […]
June 16, 2019
n my real job, nobody listens to any suggestions I have to offer. And it’s a cock up there. But on the Western Bay Railroad, at least some of the things I say get put into practice. Like today – I’m sitting in the small office (more like an outhouse with the hole boarded up) in Placerville Jct. I can see train 315 toiling up the long grade from Ute Jct, a steam engine on the head end, another behind the tail end passenger car*, shoving. The last times we did this we met with various levels of success. Usually […]