At the throttle

I‘m riding the end of 298, grinding up the long grade to Harris Glen behind two gasping Geep-9s (if it wasn’t for the helpers, we’d still be back in Pittsburgh). My caboose is banging against a pair of fuel tankers and I’m thinking I’m one cigarette from going to the moon. This isn’t Yardmaster Frank’s fault – he’s only following my own generated switch lists. But really, the railroad is moving pretty well and the newbie dispatcher is moving us along pretty damn quick. My guest engineer Paul has everything down. We’re ordered to drop the helpers at Harris, just […]

After we got the issues of the Bruces settled (a true “Bruce on first” moment), and after some of the slowpokes got in (you can tell railroaders by how they get somewhere on time), we got down to running trains. Superintendent JW has made a number of solid improvements to his layout: better lighting, some progression of scenery, and even squirrel damage repair. All to the good. But like any host, it’s never good enough. I wasn’t really noticing how the layout ran. I was rattling along in my favorite run, the Sand and Lumber train, a movement I personally […]

So at the start of the week, I was dispatching on a middle-sized coal hauler. By midweek, I was dispatching a huge railroad stretching across several states, as well as running their freight forwarding division. And now, on Sunday, I’m sitting in a going-to-rust, unwashed FEC engine in Miami Yard, tugging cars back and forth, a lowly classification hogger. How did this happen? The author side of me wishes it was because of a substance abuse problem, a fight over a woman, or perhaps because I caused a wreck that killed innocents and this was the only railroad job I […]

It’s been a paperwork sort of week. On Tuesday at work, we held the wall in an ISO audit, with me with two big three-ring binders full of paperwork details. But more importantly, this month I also wrote a switch list generator for our club. The problem we faced was with our waybills and people walking off with pocketfuls of them. And every time they did, we had to make new waybills and generate entire runs of switchlists. A pain, it twas. So now I generated full lists for every train. The trick here was the order things happened. Cars […]

I hate the idea of bucket lists. The thing is, if you are going to have an experience, it shouldn’t be an afternoon thing, something you do once without any expertise or knowledge or appreciation. It should be something you know and have studied and put an effort into. That said, I’ve dispatched dozens of railroads. I’ve run them with everything from mother-may-I to warrants to CTC. But I’ve never dispatched a railroad under timetable and train order (one of the most intensive and tricky ways to do it). And this is funny because I actually wrote code to dispatch […]

It’s been that sort of day. We had an audit walkthrough today, all across lunch. And the weight measuring group thing didn’t go so good for me. Then that production failure and the process-dripping patch. Just problems problems problems. While driving towards the crete-heap of Oburg with its snarled traffic, I really felt the urge to get off at my exit and just go home, to have dinner and play Spelunky or read or whatever. I wasn’t in the mood for the scheduled ops. But we make our commitments and hold to them, so into the swirling hell of traffic […]

It’s four thirty in the afternoon and Frank and I have just about exchanged our life stories. It’s after two days of early setup, countless miles of model train running, of hundreds of little kids and answering questions and chatting with model enthusiasts. The Deland Train show always takes some effort but brings in some nice scratch, so we’re happy to attend. The thing is (and I’ve mentioned this before), we’ve got space-age modules now. They set up like a dream, and close up as fast as an umbrella. We can go from trains running to ‘away all trailers’ in […]

ome math… When I ran a train through John’s scale speedometer, I tended to hit 33mph or so. Given that one slow train (mine) tends to set the pace for everyone on our Jacksonville mainline, we can assume ALL the trains were hitting that speed. Note that this, as well as all my other estimates, are low-ball. There was an average of 3-5 trains on the layout at any time. We’ll lowball with that and say 3. That means, every hour, our three trains clocking 33mph were running 100 scale miles. Or 550 scale miles each day, for a total […]

One of the pivotal (and poetic) moments of history is Sept 15th, 1940 during the Battle of Britain. This was the day the Germans threw their entire bomber and fighter force against the English Isles, and the day the English had everything (including their reserves, as it was famously stated) up. It’s one of those days you see coming, and then the storm breaks upon you. That was the club tonight. When I’d heard that two of our solid operators weren’t going to make it, I thought it was pretty much a wash. This close to the holidays, members start […]