Train Blog
October 16, 2012
The Saint Louis Gateway is an odd railroad simulation. There isn’t that usual balance of yard/locals/freights (with passengers tossed in because we have to). This one is about high speed, high volume running. Several staging yards point at the SH Junction like a Polish firing squad. And when the session starts, a half-dozen trains leap into motion. And that’s the deal – it all comes down to that one signal tower keeping things moving smoothly. Outside of one working yard and a couple of big grain silos, it’s mostly long trains highballing across the prairie. To really enjoy it, the […]
October 15, 2012
I’m out of Johnstown, moving through the Pennsylvanian morning in an RS unit for the Stenzel Valley local. I’ve got Mike as my brakeman, a friendly guy who showed me around the layout earlier. Since the J&G has run precisely one time before (it’s new), we’re not sure how the run is going to come out. Sometimes new procedures turn out to be overly difficult, even impossible, requiring new methodologies. So now we’re at the Stenzel cuttoff, with Mike dropping from the caboose to realign the turnout behind us to the main while I call clear to the dispatcher. And […]
October 14, 2012
Dixierails is a weekend ops gathering in Atlanta, ten layouts open for four sessions (Friday, Saturday AM, Saturday PM, and Sunday). It’s a lot of fun and you get to mix with many other operations enthusiasts from all over the country. So, first layout for me, the Southwestern Pennsylvania Railroad, a nice N-scale. This has some of the best N-scale operations I’ve ever run on. So I’ve run down to Junction Yard, a short hop over from Cumberland. I’ve got two sidings, one empty, one with the exchange cars I need. I roll down the empty and as soon as […]
October 6, 2012
We took our space-age sectional layout to this weekend’s Deland show. Lots of fun, especially following a really easy setup (six guys, one hour of casual effort). Had some problems – what show wouldn’t have problems? After all, we’re moving a complex assemblage forty miles and putting it together in a strange place, to run tiny trains with all sorts of electronics. So first we had problems with the taillights of the truck the night before (I went over to Bob’s early this morning to follow him and act as taillights). Then one of the new digitrax cables were pinched, […]
September 26, 2012
Well, the last couple of weeks have been club-tuf. We got our mower stolen. I got pulled off the sectional layout to work on the permanent, but neither is where I wanted them to be. A show is coming up. Got two out-of-state ops-trips to arrange. Work work work. I was pretty ground out from all this. Just tired. Came out for ops not knowing what to expect but, frankly, expecting the worse. Then again, I always anticipate the worst. That way, you’re never disappointed. But tonight, I was pleasantly surprised. I had fun at the club. Fun. Imagine that. […]
September 23, 2012
Sometimes ops are very detailed, by the clock, by the book, era- and road-specific affairs. And sometimes its just pretty much running trains. Doc has been getting his old UP Nebraska Division (Omaha to Denver) back in service after a very long hiatus. He’d cleaned and staged, but I know the waybills were all over the place so we’d pretty much be just running through, no real switching. And that was fine. With the hassles of getting the modules ready for the upcoming show, the stolen lawnmower issue and club elections, it was nice just to run trains with friends […]
September 16, 2012
It’s very hard to keep a train club going through a hard economic downturn. Our older members get, well, older, and younger members just aren’t that common anymore. Its really not the high-speed, instant-gratification hobby they want. So there you are. But as money gets tighter, as we’ve got to pay for everything from paper towels to trailers, it doesn’t help that we are in a white-slum, corn pone neighborhood. It’s just white-trash, trailers, pickups, tattoos, and about six teeth total. And they’ve been ripping us off. First it was the AC copper. Then came the five rapid break ins […]
August 23, 2012
You might have remembered my story about having my leg ripped clean off my torso (or something like that) HERE. As I mentioned, I just wanted to watch Jersey Shore in my pain/drugged haze. But tonight was ops and I had to be there. Since my ePass transponder was in the shop with the rest of my car, I had to drive all the way out on Colonial Drive, a study of stop-n-go Iphone-distracted reaction times. I took something like an hour to get there. Anyway, good session though sparsely attended. Matthew wanted to dispatch – he’d been watching how […]
August 12, 2012
I was pretty beat – I’ve been going full bore all weekend. And now it was ops in a warn garage and I was waiting for my train to be built in Orlando Yard. The two kids running the yard (ordinarily competent on their own) were bickering and scuffling, both working counterpoint to each other. Three adults were waiting for trains to be built. I was out of patience. I walked in, tried to reason, got nowhere, and went edge-on – told them these trains and throttles weren’t their’s, that they needed to treat the layout with care and respect […]
July 25, 2012
Well, it’s been a while, for this blog and for ops. Was busy with the show stuff last month so ops got canceled, and that Dale Carnegie class is on our usual ops night. Been a while. So I was looking forward to the session at the club, even though the AC was reported running dodgy, that we might not have enough guys, the usual worries. Well, the AC ran fine. We had all sorts of membership there, and a bunch of guests. The railroad was running hot – every movement was in play, alone with several extras. The dispatcher […]