Train Blog
March 23, 2025
t was such a nice morning. Came out of the house as the sun broke over the trees, breath steaming in the cold as I made my way to the car. Swung by the coffee shop to pick up a cup. Dropped by Zach’s place to mailbag him for the ride out – an informal meeting of the ONT Operations Committee. Happy to say while we rode out, we might have cracked the steel mill output dilemma, as well as tidying up the freight flow across our club’s bridge route. Time for a quick meal in Wendy’s before heading over […]
March 17, 2025
hen I was a small lad, I dreamed of dispatching. The idea of trains ordered to meet other trains at passing sidings, of rolling through stations, that was a really cool image. It was an unrealized dream. And now? Today on the New Haven Highland Division, dispatching was like Donkey Kong. The entire day I was running up ramps and jumping over barrels, tormented by a host of huge monkeys beating their chests. Really, I was wedged in a corner behind a panel that didn’t make a lot of sense at times, yelling across the room or squinting up at […]
March 9, 2025
ait, wait, wait. That’s all railroading was sometimes. The engineer for 101 South yawned through his bushy beard, the setting sun painting the right side of his lead unit, reflecting off the shiny refrigerated cars behind him, turning their white and orange flanks almost toyish in its light. Already the track-side buildings were silhouetted, their long shadows hiding the grubby weeds and litter along the Florida East Coast main. Fortunately he was running south with empty reefers; while he wouldn’t have time-critical oranges losing value, there were still schedule commitments to keep. It was the height of harvest and they […]
March 6, 2025
retty simple one for today. Got an invite from Tom Wilson to run on his enjoyable Pittsburgh & West Virginia, a sprawling steel mill run with lots of outlying coal mines and some connecting lines (Union RR) that I still don’t think I understand. Happily, he finally corrected his railroad to be geographically correct (with East and West on the right ends) and screw the magnetic board (which I never use (and which he forgot to set out for me)). So he invited a bunch of other retirees (which speaks well about retirement) and a couple of out-of-town visitors for […]
March 2, 2025
hat I’m going to tell you can save your life!” This was my attention-getting opener for my clinic on Time Table & Train Order and, as hoped, really got attention and jacked everyone up in their seats. Al Sohl held this clinic/open house at his place – it wasn’t really an NMRA “official” event, just his club hosting clinics and an op session for people to have fun. I was third up; Eric M and Chip P had already gone (very good clinics on how the Western Bay scenery and how to present to judges for your show-pieces in working towards […]
February 27, 2025
f the club has a motto for operations, it’s “Work it out on the ground”. Last night, it was more like “Wring it out of the Clown” with West-Side Dispatcher as the clown. Another “Have a beer when I get home” night at the old clubhouse. So the session started out well enough. We were running an LV Interchange train, a run that we’ll see if we can keep up with it. It’s a bit time-challenged but yes, it might work. But I’d talked things out with the locals (Mingo and Zanesville) and made a pinky promise with 927 (ZV) […]
February 24, 2025
o what to say? Andy did his best to set up a better session, an improved session. His remote cameras are clearer than before, that horizontal interference gone. And his radios – big change there. With the ear pieces (not buds), you can now comfortably follow the conversation on the line. Where once it was a scratchy, crackling hell (with some family jamming us with their domestic trivialities) we now actually had comfortable, solid communications. While there was still a little stepping-on action, it wasn’t too bad. It was more like watching a railroad video with the dispatcher soundtrack added. […]
February 16, 2025
‘ve always said that not many model train clubs (especially temperamental-equipment N-scale clubs) do what we do. We pack more trains into a session than anyone. Last night, on our Saturday Night Special, we really went all out on a Time Table & Train Order session, where men are men and the dead are pulped. Our timetable has eight scheduled trains. Given the wide range of times and outcomes for locals, we have to run them all as extras. And under TT&TO, extras generate paperwork. The time we ran with just scheduled trains last year, I think I wrote John […]
February 16, 2025
t was a quiet night at the club, one of our Friday Night “Just Run Trains” events. I usually go to them to be the troubleshooter/babysitter (you gotta have a senior member present, if only to unlock the gates and door, and to plunger the toilet, right?). Since Zeus was up from Miami and not much was going on, we tugged Tuscarora out, quickly set it up and ran a fast session, just tower and local. Zeus took first shift running while I did leverman. There wasn’t much to say about it, which (like an airplane flight) is really how […]
February 9, 2025
hen I was in college, there was a board game about a Soviet sea invasion called Jacksonville: The beaches of DOOM. I never played it but I think I lived it on Friday. So the rubber hit the road – and blew. Three separate road incidents. Our trailer was low on Thursday when Jeff picked it up. Even through he refilled it, it was dead flat Friday morning, making him and his wife run over to a tire shop to get it replaced. Meanwhile, Greg hit something on 95 resulting in a catastrophic failure (tire, tube and rim) delaying him […]