Good morning everyone. Chloe, I will have two bananas and a large coffee today. Thank you.
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The limiting factor to sales was that we could only take cash. If we had any way to accept a credit card or other transfer payment, we would have sold a lot more.
We must fix that for September.
Bad house guests are the worst. So sorry.
I was opposed to having a guest room in the house, but my wife won out on that one. I hope it is rarely used.
It was quite an experience. I will probably post more about it later.
Sad about Gordon. I saw him once at the concert hall here in 1969. Took a girl I was dating with whom I hoped to marry one day but it didn’t work out. I was in 3rd year at the uni. I find that a lot of things trigger old memories lately.
This morning we got our 3rd covid booster. Have evaded it so far.
It has really warmed up here with temps in the 60s. Tomorrow I plan on taking the thatch rake to the front lawn. The lawn is small as most if the yard is covered by 3 huge spruce trees.
Mike, the staircase looks great. I haven’t lived in a 2 storey house since I was 13. Your photos made me think of my childhood home that had a large oak staircase in the middle of the house. See what I mean about triggers.
All of the roundhouses here are long gone. Winnipeg had major shops for both CN and CP. There is still a small roundhouse and turntable in Thief River Falls.
Previously she was a highly competant physician and not rude at all. After a 40 year relationship/marriage she divorced and got the short end of the stick. She says she has AHDH, OCD, PTSD, long Covid. She was supposed to visit us 2 years ago and canceled because:
Fell off a ladder and broke her heel
Had a migraine and couldn’t drive.
Got Covid
Had a screw removed from her heel
Had a migraine.
Had a migraine
Got Covid (3rd time for her despite all the jabs)
She lives in Chapel Hill, U of NC Med Center and had never gone to the migraine clinic, where they have more useful drugs than the ones she is on.
Finally she showed up a year ago, knowing we would take her out to dinner, she arrived at 10 pm
This time I asked her to share her location. At 7:30 am she texted me that I was snarky. Her car wasn’t packed. She was supposed to arrive between 4-6 pm. At 5:30 she was “checking her car” She rolled in at 11:15 pm claiming to have gotten lost on WAZE. Never called to say she was running late.
After dinner the second night, she (who was a wine connoisseur when she lived in San Francisco) asked for a funnel so she pour what was left in her wine glass back in the bottle. I belong to another forum with lots of emojis. We need a puke emoji to insert right here.
Henry, I hope this woman has a relative or friend living near her in Chapel Hill who can watch out for her. She sounds like she is going to need help dealing with things over the next years.
That’s too bad, and I’m sure it’s hard for you guys to watch a friend lose her way in life.
Good Morning Diners. Brunhilda, a large coffee to go please.
I appreciate the kind words on the staircase guys. A lot of work, but worth it. Most frustrating out of all of it was that the stairs were carpeted before the knotty pine walls were put up and the tile laid in the pantry area at the bottom of the stairs. Pulling the carpet showed me that even if we had wanted to recarpet them, major work would have had to take place as there was no way to reattach the carpet in a couple locations without ripping the walls off. Not an easy task as whoever put the knotty pine up both nailed and glued them up! [banghead] I have to investigate (someday) why two outlets on an outside wall in that area don’t work and I’ll have to do it by tearing apart the wall from the outside. Not high on my priority list!
The audit is still going well (knock on wood). Two more days.
TF, I’m not a Pennsy modeler, but I do love the GG1’s. I’m going to have to get one or two someday. Beautiful.
Two lucky ladies in the cab! I’ve had the pleasure (and thrill) to ride behind both the GG1s and the above P-1a motors. These locomotives are amazing with their smooth, effortless power!
Good Morning, diners. Bacon, eggs, and coffee, please.
TF, welcome back! It looks like you two had a good time.
Compared to many of you, I’m a newcomer to model railroads and to the forum.
Every-so-often, there is a thread complaining about Model Railroader not being as good as it used to be. I don’t have that experience, so I can’t comment on that.
But … I got my June issue yesterday. I liked it as much as every other issue I’ve gotten over the past five years.
I love the magazine, and I read it cover to cover – even the articles that I’m not really too interested in. I even read the ads. This is the only mail I look forward to receiving, and I’m not disappointed when it arrives.
I, too, love the GG1. Even though I model the Milwaukee in the transition era, I still had to have one. I had a Lionel one in O scale when I was a kid. The one I’ve got now is a Bachmann.
I think it’s sad when all of those marvelous structures like roundhouses, etc. go the way of the dinosaur. In my home town, the UP had a roundhouse and other servicing structures. I had been to that roundhouse as a kid several times. The roundhouse is gone. The turntable is gone. I don’t know if they tore the turntable out completely or just took out the turntable and filled in the pit. In any event, one would never know that those things had been there. Not far from the roundhouse there used to be a thriving flour mill, a fairly large operation. There were two tracks usually full of boxcars full of grain being processed 24/7. Now it’s all abandoned. Oh well, as they say, you can never go back home, meaning that if you do, nothing is the same as when you left.
Today I went over to one of the nearby suburbs. I got stopped by a train at the grade crossing. “Oh goody,” I’m thinking. “Hmmm, only a single Canadian Pacific locomotive at the front. Must not be a very long train.” 10 to 15 minutes later with a long string of tank cars, “Ok, there’s a pusher loco at the back of the train. What’s this? Kansas City Southern?! Oh, no merger promotion going on here!”
I would imagine there’ll come a time when the Western roads merge with the Eastern roads and be coast to coast. Ya know, I hope it doesn’t happen, but look at what’s already happened with mergers. Part of the interest is all of the different roads that were once active.
Way back when I was in High School I learned the “Songs of Travel” Cycle by Ralph Vaughn Williams. I performed the entire Cycle several times in my Career. The one I always had trouble with being able to sing and not get emotional was “Wither Must I Wander”. “Home No More Home to me……” IIRC it was the last song in the Cycle.
I took my sons to NYC from Baltimore in 2008 or 09. There were a bunch of GG1’s parked off to the east.
In 1958 and a few years later, my father took me on the same route and we had breakfast in the dining car and the toilet emptied directly on the tracks. I still have the passenger timetable somewhere. I think one way was $9. I wish we had booked the parlor car.
Trackfiddler posted the 4935… I got to run that one, fancy paint and all…! Just around New Haven motor storage, but back when I was a young hostler we always liked those moves, we got an hour extra for towing the power car along with it.
Since the topic is roundhouses, here’s a pic of the old New Haven roundhouse at Cedar Hill engine terminal:
(can’t find a way to grab a link directly to the pic)
By the time I got to work at Cedar Hill (I actually got called for only one job at the engine house back in 1979), the roundhouse still stood, but all that remained in use was the “lead” and the [locked down] turntable – so you could get clearance to throw a switch and then move back to another track outside.
Here’s OE’s photo. Be sure to look at all the details. A pair of sand towers on the ground. A crew of M-of-W workers cleaning up a pile of ties but it looks like a length of new track there, too?
I spent a day at New Haven passenger station back in '73. So much to see and so much activity. Even then it was half of what it had been just ten years before.
Good Morning Diners. Chloe, large coffee and a side of bacon please.
Well, my auditor and I are currently in a disagreement about something he is hung up on. We’ll see where it lands. He’s been very sensible so far about things, but just keeps getting hung up on this topic that, in our site’s opinion, we are meeting. Funny thing is, if he wants to push it and write it up as a finding, I am auditing a site in his area in two weeks where they all work together to address the “issue” he is bringing up, and how they handle it doesn’t meet the stance he is taking with us. His own approach doesn’t meet what he wants to write us up for but he is arguing that how they do it is good! Not that there’s revenge in an audit or anything, but nothing like putting a target on yourself.
I hope that doesn’t happen too. That’s part of what I consider a major bonus about modeling the period I do (around WWII). The variety of lines is fantastic and keeps the train watching interesting.
Ray: Pretty song. Unfortunately fo me, the lyrics are a little bit lost. To my ears the lyrics are little more than vowel sounds of varying pitch. I would guess that the singer was being picked up by a condenser mike. He’s about 30-36" away from it, unlike rock bands who practically swallow the things. Back when my ears would allow me to mix for music at church, I always miked the singers with condenser mikes because they never got upon them. I digress. Anyway, thanks for posting.
Good morning, diners. Lots of black coffee this morning.
What nice days to live on the plains. Farmers are planting, birds are fighting over territory, warm days and cool nights!
Yesterday, Daisy the Dachshund (she’s still alive and kicking) and I spent several hours in the rocking chairs on the front porch, with neighbors stopping by to talk, just enjoying the great life. It looks like today will be a repeat.
That’s the truth! I barely recognize my hometown now. Even the house I grew up in looks foreign to me. Trains used to stop in that town – now they just roll through.
OldEngineman, that is really a neat photo of the New Haven roundhouse. Lots to see in that old picture.
This sounds like you might have some fun in several weeks. Your line of work sounds awfully difficult to me – I would be lost in ten seconds of explanations.
Ray, I remember some of the Ralph Vaughn Williams ‘Songs of Travel’, but I guess I never really appreciated them. I do like the Robert L. Stevenson’s poems that inspired Williams.
Yes, that picture was taken in April, 2019 just South of the Wyoming border in Utah.
Not true if your childhood home was near the campus of the University Of Florida. Everytime I go back I am so amazed how much is still exactly the same, even the places we used to live.
These pictures were taken in 2015. They look pretty much the same as 1975 when I was riding my bicycle around these same places.
-Photographs by Kevin Parson
The University Of Florida was the perfect place to grow up.
More than one friend in the Forum here
Images courtesy of ASME and the two guys right of the turntable bridge[;)]
