Scattered Thoughts . . .

A ccording to the latest news I received from The Amherst Railway Society, the organizers of the annual Amherst Railway Society's Railroad Hobby Show have taken a week off but are now already working on next year's show. The photo, at right, shows the module that won "Best in Show" for this year.  It is a section of a larger layout that I highlighted previously in another blog entry (before I knew it won "Best in Show") because I felt it was exceptional.  Apparently the judges agreed with me! I just saw in the February newsletter that this year's show had the highest attendance ever!  That is saying something because this show is a very popular show every year.  This year's attendance was at 27,535.  That is a lot of people crowded into four buildings!  Of course, we are now post-pandemic and that makes a difference and the weather was good which also makes a difference for those people who are traveling more than a half hour or so.  We've been ...

A few models at the train show caught my eye especially those models that are models I plan to build and add to my new garden railroad.  I'm always looking for good ideas which is one of the reasons why I bring my camera to these shows. One of the buildings I plan to add to our garden railroad is an old coaling silo but I need to come up with a design.  Right now I'm going on rather faint memories of a coaling silo in a nearby town when I was a child.  My design doesn't need to be of a fully operational condition because I want it to be more like an old abandoned coaling silo...  I think, anyway.  I know my O scale railroad will be a model of an operational silo but the garden railroad's silo will be more of a symbolic thing from my past so it really doesn't need to be perfectly realistic nor perfectly to scale.  Actually, an F scale coaling silo would still be tremendous so I will probably scale it down to avoid it being overwhelming in my rather small ga...

W e arose at 6:30am on the first morning of the train show so we could get some breakfast at The Cracker Barrel restaurant (which was nearby but due to toll roads and a crappy neighborhood that is very difficult to navigate through required an extra 15 minutes...  tolerating this little detour, however, is always a better option that trying to stomach the free inedible breakfast the hotel serves in the lobby).  Getting up at 6:30am allowed us time to get to the show by the time the doors open for the day.   All the doors to the show open to the sound of a loud steam whistle that can be heard from miles away and we were at the ticket booths   when the whistle blew.  We also  managed to avoid the long lines of cars trying to enter The Big E so our timing was good and the route we chose was good. While at the ticket booths purchasing our tickets I was shivering uncontrollably.  Nobody else around me seemed cold but I was visibly shivering.  I kn...