Whoo-Whoo

Tuesday is Writing Assignment Day. Current projects and the like. I think I need to change my schedule. Not only do I not follow it, but I'm mostly doing my posts on writing over on The Great Sea and Tales From The Great Sea.

So what to write about here?

What about model trains?

I like model trains. Way back when I had a Lionel. That one I didn't much care for. Too big, I guess. But it was really when we visited my uncle's house and I saw he had an entire corner of his basement devoted to a model train layout. I was fascinated.

There were tunnels and mountains and trees and buildings. Everything constructed with his imagination. I wanted to have a my own.

A number of years later I did get a set. It was HO gauge, which I still found to be too big. It needed so much space. I never did anything with the set, though. Model railroading is not exactly cheap, and my parents were exactly swimming in the dough.

Later, after I was married, Spouse bought me an N scale set. This was wonderful! The right size. I bought a piece of 4'-8' plywood, a package of Mountains in Minutes, and proceeded to build my railroad community. Not having much of a grasp in how electricity works, I designed an unworkable layout. You see, electricity flows through wire very similar to how water flows through a pipe. You can't turn it back on itself or the whole thing comes to a halt. The only thing I have left from that set are a few cars. Once Spouse realized that model railroading consists of constantly spending more money support for this hobby came to an abrupt halt.

One of the greatest things I saw was when I worked for a small town newspaper. My editor knew of some retired guys who had converted an old pig barn into a model railroading club and sent me there to do a story on it. It was a really cool setup. One guy had even spent something like three months building a monstrous trestle bridge. The building was about sixty feet long and thirty wide. Or something like that. Very rectangular. The far back wall was mountains. The long left wall was countryside with a small village. The long right wall was city and train yard. The close end was where they had set up the control booth.

The men took turns operating the trains. They had a schedule in which certain cars needed to be delivered to certain places at certain times. They kept written records of what they did when they were in charge. At the beginning they had to manually unhitch cars. Now they were in the process of wiring in automatic de-couplers. It looked like so much fun.

Some day, if money ever decides to live with me again, I may just set up another train layout. I'll work off a schedule, too. But if it goes anything like this blog, I'm going to be off schedule in short order.