At the throttle

Train Blog

March 26, 2016

OpsLog – FEC – 3/26/2016

ometimes you have ops sessions that make you want to slink away and take up stamp collecting… But…. Sometimes you have ops that you want to lacquer up and hang on the wall, and just lean back in your easy chair and look at them, preferably smoking a big fat cigar. Yeah, today’s run of the FEC was one of those days. Man, did we have fun! I ran the panel and was feeling so comfortable with it, I wasn’t looking at the in-out cheat-sheet, but actually working the yard throat panel logically. We had everything moving including a rail […]
March 23, 2016

OpsLog – LM&O – 3/23/2016

e’re going to have to start throwing random events in. It went too well. Oh, I know that there are always derailments and issues. The random car spotting has gotten crazy (Variety Press is getting all their unsold copies of Early ReTyrement back, it seems). But really, from the panel, it was a smooth night. We ran all the drag freights, most of the passengers and three of the four locals. Everyone came in and set up smooth. I fired up the computer and got the back office running. Had some guests show and put them on 202 – poor […]
March 16, 2016

MaintLog – Orlando NTrak – 3/6/2016

asn’t looking forward to this – started getting reports while in India (of all places) that the front porch of the train club was rotting away and needed replacement. Could there be something I’d want to do less that that? Okay, so great thanks are due to Bill Sterner, John Ligda and Bill White who all came out on a Sunday to work this. Our plans were to spend today getting as far as we could with demolition and see what a future rebuild effort would entail. First good luck – a few months ago I happened to find some […]
March 12, 2016

OpsLog – WBRR – 3/12/2016

staple of western drama (overblown western drama, indeed) is that of the misunderstood genius, one who dreams magnificently and throws himself into reaching efforts, only to suffer the destruction of his mad plans. In the end, he is left to croak in the ruins of his endeavors about how “it should have worked, the fools, the fools…!” Yes. Look, I know you can get three trains past on a single siding. I’ve done it in warrants, on CTC boards, and various forms of mother-may-I. It is a stock in trade maneuver on the L&N (where sidings are short and sharp […]
February 27, 2016

OpsLog – FEC – 2/27/2016

he Hindus have a little idea, how everyone who dies is resurrected. I can only hope this is true. If it is, in my next life, perhaps I’ll run that Cocoa switcher a little better than I did today. Just stupid blunders. I needed tanks, gons and a couple of boxcars for a train I was building. Tanks and gons were all scattered in the north yard – had to go cherrypicking. The boxes were in a neat little grouping one track away from where I’d construct the outbound turn. And it seemed like a good idea (at the time) […]
February 25, 2016

OpsLog – LM&O – 2/24/2016

o joke – when you go wheels up out of Delhi at 3am and touch down in Orlando at 8pm the same day, you’ve either got a really fast plane or you’re making up the time-in-flight adding in the time difference from flying halfway round the world, ten and a half hours in this case. That equates to twenty-seven hours in planes and airports, all during the longest day in your life. And yes, you’ll have jetlag like you won’t believe following this. Somehow I made it in to work Monday for our most important audit we face every two […]
January 30, 2016

OpsLog – FEC – 1/30/2016

“Such a day; rum all out. Our company somewhat sober; a damned confusion amongst us! Rogues a plotting. Talk of separation. So I looked sharp for a prize and took one with a great deal of liquor aboard. So kept the company hot, damned hot, then all things went well again.” – Edward Teach (Blackbeard) think I know why I thought about this during the FEC’s latest op session. Both shed doors were open. Had a train pull past a turnout and then back unannounced. But I’d already thrown the switch behind him and he backed over it. A caboose […]
January 27, 2016

OpsLog – LM&O – 1/27/2016

ome nights hosting club ops, you got to be all in. Like, driving rain so a lot of members didn’t come out. But we were filled with guests. Then the phone system went out. Then Bob Martin’s back went out. I thought I was going to black out. A couple of members looked at the confusion of the crowd (about a quarter of them were visitors) and said I should dispatch instead of the kid. So in all the madness, the mud and the muddle, I’m standing there looking at the call sheet where I just put my name in […]
January 10, 2016

ShowLog – Deland – 1/9,10/2016

t was, without a doubt, the best of times and the worst of times. In sheer bad luck, the truck pulling our trailer had a flat battery and got to the fairgrounds late. Road construction shook the living poo out of our modules, causing all sorts of breakage. And when the layout went live, it shorted across the panel, red lights everywhere. Oh, and my techno aces were mostly at a convention or out in the ocean somewhere. Deep breath. Okay, the panel was an easy fix – someone had bumped the digitrax box off the run mode. And the […]
November 21, 2015

OpsLog – FEC – 11/21/2015

ometimes these things can be tough to write. Outside of a turnout being left open, some paperwork getting misfiled, and little snigglets here and there, there wasn’t much material for a fire-n-brimstone ops report. No insights, no breakthroughs, no flashes of intuition. Except one. Bruce and I drove over and met Bob and the FEC crew for the holiday/last-session-of-the-year shindig. There was food in cornucopia amounts, side dishes and deserts and everything you could want to stuff in your gob. And then we ran. Bruce and I ran as a team, lucky to find ourselves on local jobs(which is the […]