SANTA TRAIN - 2014

Sorry it took me so long to get the Santa Train on the Blog… but I am using my broken foot as an excuse. OK, it might not be a good excuse, but it is a fact. It will also explain why there are not very many pictures of the kids with  Santa… Well, my inability to stand where I could get a decent shot and the crowd in the building, because we had trains running and because it was raining outside. The parking lot was filled with cars but no crowds of people like in the past. Just too wet! So, in they came, and stayed!

   

So, everyone crowded inside, some enjoyed watching the trains, some enjoyed the popcorn, hot chocolate, and cookies, but everyone enjoyed being inside a building where it was not raining and was warmer than outside.

Niall was wonderful with the little ones, as usual.

  

Santa had a comfortable spot to sit this year. He did not have to be under a tent – he had a brand new room to sit in.

 

it was almost dark when they left.

OPEN HOUSE – VETERAN’S DAY, 2014

 

We had a great Open House today as part of the Town’s Veteran’s Day Parade and festivities! 43 visitors – 8 kids – some Boy Scouts – and a Yorkie! The trains ran well – we discovered we need a governor on one of the layouts… when the kids shove the handle to full throttle… well… So we had a derailment or two, but, hey. This happens.

We got the farm together somewhat… not done, but the corn is about ready to be harvested and the hens are laying eggs. The goat ate some bushes, but that happens. The Exmore diner was open for business even tho construction is still going on.

Anyway, if you were there… thank you so much for helping out! If you could not make it – you missed out on a fun day – maybe we will see you for Santa Train – Dec. 6th. Santa usually arrives around 2:30. Mark it on your calendar! Wait ‘til he sees the new room! (I wonder if he remembers the year the roof leaked so bad we had to put him under a tent – inside the building!) Progress!

Come see how much progress we have made on the building, the new rooms, and the layouts!

Progress. We are all about Progress.

the COLORS OF NOVEMBER

The leaves changed suddenly this year. One day they were green, 2 days later the yellow was blasting away from the tree tops making people stop and look as if they had never seen those colors before.

Personally, I love the contrasts that we have this time of year… with the camellias starting to bloom, the deep, deep green of their leaves and the bright yellows of autumn on the Eastern Shore. We have very few bright red leaves. Generally bright red warns one of poison ivy here. The red maples of the Poconos and New England are few and far between. So for reds, we seem to have a plethora of berries. Old wives tales tell us that this many berries mean a bad winter. Well, we shall see. The birds definitely will have plenty to eat here! Of course, not all berries are red… the beautyberry bush is loaded with rich purple berries, branches so full they are all the way down on the ground.

   

The St John’s Wort continues to bloom, 2 or 3 blooms at a time. I liked this view with the golden carpet of leaves behind it. Next to the St John’s Wort is one of the few reddish leaves from a young dogwood. A new azalea is in bloom as the pink and lavender azaleas start to fade.

 

The sidewalk is pink from my birthday camellia, the hosta is changing color.a different pink camellia is in bloom, and Ice Angel made the camera take her picture again this time with a yellow tree in the background.

 

With all this color going on in Mother Nature, we started coloring up the old Train Station. We had several days with temps in or near the 70s, so we took advantage of that and finished priming, then painting the track side of the Station. On Saturday then, Niall and Tom climbed up and began to paint our trim. Another coat will be awesome! Paul started the door… Between taking pictures and passing buckets of paint around, I played inside with an N scale train that will be going in the old showcase. See how tiny it is? I can get an entire layout in this 2’x6’ showcase. I just need to decide what I want to do. (A note for Ginnie, it is perfect height for laying it out from a wheelchair!) 

 

THE MORMONS GOT IT WRONG

A TRUE STORY, WITH apologies to any Mormons reading this...
About a month ago, a group of us, Board members from SPOTS (http://onley-spots.blogspot.com/), went across the Bay to a Train Show at the VA Beach Convention Center. I was the only female with 4 of our male Directors. I was excited as it would be my first train show and I was anxious to see and learn. I don’t even pretend to know anything about model trains, so several of the men who have extensive train layouts of their own were going to teach me, as I really need to know about model trains in order to help get our education program up and running.
As some of you know, I cannot walk very far – I am lucky to be walking at all having been told many years ago I would never walk again after a really bad car accident. So, I took my wheel chair. The guys were more than wonderful, helping to push me thru the huge parking lot and into the building. That convention center is enormous! I never could have walked it. One guy or the other stayed with me almost all the time, gladly explaining the differences in the engines, types of track, names of the different cars, what they would have been used for in a real train… it was like being with a couple of train professors! It was GREAT!
I knew I wanted to buy some N scale cars, maybe an engine if I could find a blue one that vaguely resembled what runs here on the shore, and I was happy to see so many N scale trains at the show. (Check the SPOTS blog for the size of N scale and what I bought.) For example, the N scale engine I bought is no longer than a ball point pen. One or another of the men advised me and actually made the decisions for me when we had several things to choose from, after explaining the differences. They were extremely kind and attentive. One section of the show had some cool N scale kits. Dennis looked the kits over and we found something we thought would be just perfect. He explained everything to me; I put the kit aside, and continued to look for some box cars that were plain and of good color that we could put our station logo on. See, I don’t mind shopping like a woman – “What do you want, dear?” “Oh, something in blue…” I even use that when I buy cars! Tho’ today, I say “a van in blue.” But the logic in multiple bright colors in train cars (yeah, there IS some logic here) is because it will attract the kids better than a bunch of cars all the same, same color, same shape – which might be more authentic, I admit, but is also atheistically very boring. And we will be looking to keep kids interested in what we are doing, even if it is only learning shapes and colors with the littlest kids. “Can you find a car that is like a cylinder?” There are ‘shape ID’ SOLs for several grade levels. I also needed stuff for the scenery (my department) and buying stuff on line just wasn't working out real well.
Anyway, I digress, as usual… after I picked out what I wanted, it was time to pay the girl who was working the table with her husband. They were young, under 30, I am sure, but at this point in my ancient life, they all look like high school kids just as when I was in my teens and 20s, anyone over 50 was ancient! I pulled out the checkbook, made out the check, and looked around for Niall to co-sign the check as the group would be buying the train set, and the checks require 2 signatures. The girl saw me looking around and, seeing Dennis at the end of the aisle said, “Your husband is over there.”
“Oh, no,” I said – the word husband having not registered in my brain yet – “I need the one in the yellow jacket. Be right back…” as I rolled off in search of Niall. I found Niall and brought him back to look at what Dennis and I had picked out, he thought it was a good purchase, and co-signed the check. If we were getting funny looks from the kids selling the stuff, I did not notice. Not yet.
Time went by, we all split and rejoined each other here and there throughout the show, but I usually had someone by my side or nearby to explain things to me, suggest that I needed this one, not that one, and why. Like I said, I felt like a kid in school with the experts teaching Model Trains, 101. After a while, I went back to the table where I had found the N train kit and looked for some more box cars. This time Tom was with me. We picked out a few more cars, but rather than try to chase Niall down, I just put them on my credit card. Tom was also very attentive, enjoying teaching the rookie and watching someone get bitten by the Train bug. It was at this time the girl really took notice that I was with 3 different men. But when I showed up with Pat to show him an HO car I wanted and to pick up some stuff for the scenery, she really began looking at me kind of funny. I mean, here I was, an old lady in a wheel chair, with 4 men acting like what she was doing or buying was actually important to them. Of course, it did not keep her from taking my money.
We left the show at 2 PM, meeting each other at the entrance, maybe 30 feet away from the kids where I had made several purchases. As I rolled down their aisle on my way to meet the guys, the devil whispered in my ear. I rolled up to the young woman who definitely recognized me at this time – I might have been her best customer that day, who knows? She might have thought I was going to buy yet another couple cars or more track, so she greeted me with a smile, then looked around to see which man was in attendance. But I was alone, just passing by to get to the guys and go home. However, I stopped and quietly said to her, “Ya know, those Mormons have it all wrong. I mean, if a man can have several wives, why can’t a woman have several husbands?” Her eyes looked shocked but her face lit up in a big grin as she contemplated the idea. Her husband, having overheard my comment stepped in closer and started telling her in a slightly louder than usual voice, “Don’t listen to her, don’t listen to her!”

There stood the guys innocently waiting at the entrance, not having any idea what was being said 30 feet away… “I mean, look, 4 paychecks instead of one. Think of the shopping you can do! Always someone handy to fix things around the house…”
“DON’T LISTEN TO HER! SHUT YOUR EARS!” her husband was shouting and hitting (not hard) her arm. “DON’T LISTEN TO ANY OF THAT, ITS JUST WRONG!” Shoot, I thought the boy was going to cry! He did not tell me to go away, after all, I had spent a couple hundred dollars there that day, he had not lost sight of that, but he was getting worried! And his wife was grinning… in shock with what the old lady in the wheelchair was telling her, but her fantasies were running away with her, nonetheless, I could tell. Ah, youth...
“Don’t knock it until you try it, honey,” I said as I winked and rolled away. “Hey guys! Sorry, just wanted to say goodbye to (I forget her name). I’m coming!” I could hear him still carrying on back behind us as one of the men took over pushing my chair over the carpet and out into the sunlight, out to the Yukon. I smiled all the way home.
I bet she still thinks about it.

NAME THE FLOWER, BUILD A TREE

OK, before peeking at the rest of the pictures, do you have any idea what this precious tiny flower is? A BIG clue is the word tiny. So I will skip to building a tree... I am in the process of making trees for our train layout for the Train Station. This first tree is in the very beginning stages. See the green stuff? That is surrounding a "branch" that I hope will stay glued in place to balance the tree. A few real leaves are still attached and will be removed before attaching the foliage from the bag. I have never used ready made stuff before, always made my own back in my model making days. The second tree is more or less finished... I will make a base out of plaster - it is currently sitting in a block of plasticine. These trees will go with a O size train. I hate those bottle brush trees or the plastic snap together trees that all look alike. I like to make my own from real bushes.

So, back to the little flowers... did you guess what they were? These shots are of them in the little herb garden potting tray, next to the sage and thyme. I am sure my plants out in the garden have bloomed before and I just never noticed, but this one is on the patio. I was shocked to see the precious little flowers. Sniff, sniff, can you smell the sage, thyme and the ___________?

HORSE’S PATOOTIES AND HISTORY

Last week, my neighbor and co-author of http://www.thefrogandpenguinn.blogspot.com/, asked if anyone knew why the distance between the rails was whatever it was. He also said possums were not allowed to answer. Sigh. Maybe because this possum told him this bit of “information” some time ago, and he remembered it. Now whether it is right or wrong, or just a bit of truth or absolute fact doesn’t matter in the telling of a good story. What matters is if people REMEMBER it. Right?

The story I passed along to my neighbor was this one:

The US standard railroad gauge (distance between the rails) is 4 feet, 8.5 inches. That's an
exceedingly odd number.

Why was that gauge used?

Because that's the way they built them in England, and English expatriates built the US Railroads.

Why did the English build them like that?

Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.

Why did "they" use that gauge then?

Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools that they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.

Okay! Why did the wagons have that particular odd wheel spacing?

Well, if they tried to use any other spacing, the wagon wheels would break on some of the old,
long distance roads in England, because that's the spacing of the wheel ruts.

So who built those old rutted roads?

Imperial Rome built the first long distance roads in Europe (and England) for their legions. The
roads have been used ever since.

And the ruts in the roads?

Roman war chariots formed the initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of
destroying their wagon wheels. Since the chariots were made for Imperial Rome, they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing.

The United States standard railroad gauge of 4 feet, 8.5 inches is derived from the original
specifications for an Imperial Roman war chariot. And bureaucracies live forever. So the next time you are handed a specification and wonder what horse's ass came up with it, you may be exactly right, because the Imperial Roman war chariots were made just wide enough to accommodate the back ends of two war horses. Now the twist to the story...

When you see a Space Shuttle sitting on its launch pad, there are two big booster rockets
attached to the sides of the main fuel tank. These are solid rocket boosters, or SRBs. The SRBs are made by Thiokol at their factory at Utah. The engineers who designed the SRBs would have preferred to make them a bit fatter, but the SRBs had to be shipped by train from the factory to the launch site. The railroad line from the factory happens to run through a tunnel in the mountains. The SRBs had to fit through that tunnel. The tunnel is slightly wider than the railroad track, and the railroad track, as you now know, is about as wide as two horses' behinds.

So, a major Space Shuttle design feature of what is arguably the world's most advanced transportation system was determined over two thousand years ago by the width of a horse's ass. ... and you thought being a HORSE'S ASS wasn't important!

Now there are more facts than this story mentions, and they can get very tedious, so I won’t bore you with them. But I will say this. The first time I heard any explanation about the ruts in old Roman roads was from an archeologist friend, somewhere in Italy, (or was it in Ephesus?) but she gave the credit to a team of oxen pulling carts for the wagon wheel distance – then the Roman chariot wheel spacing followed. Somehow the horse’s ass has a funnier ring than the ass of an ox. Actually, that sounds confusing, but I won’t go there, either.

Then another friend challenged me with the ‘narrow gauge’ tracks used in this country. That answer is simple, too. The smaller carts were used in mining and were pulled by a single animal, usually a mule. If you wade thru some of the histories of the early coal mines in PA, particularly the biography of Josiah White, you can learn a lot of amazing things – like the very first tracks carrying anthracite to the Lehigh River where it was then carried by barge to the southern cities- were made of wood! It took me a whole summer to wade thru that book, but it really had some fascinating information about the very early destruction of the land, as the Europeans “tamed” the wilderness in Pennsylvania, deforested miles and miles of forest, and began mining anthracite along the Lehigh and Susquehanna rivers. Interesting, but not as entertaining. The wooden rails had to be replaced constantly as the weight of the coal quickly shattered even the hardest wood.