Christian conducts for an engineer (believe it or not) younger than him, rolling out of Folkston for distant Savannah (Steve R, note spelling). (Photo: Jim M)

hen I was in college, there was a board game about a Soviet sea invasion called Jacksonville: The beaches of DOOM. I never played it but I think I lived it on Friday.

So the rubber hit the road – and blew. Three separate road incidents. Our trailer was low on Thursday when Jeff picked it up. Even through he refilled it, it was dead flat Friday morning, making him and his wife run over to a tire shop to get it replaced. Meanwhile, Greg hit something on 95 resulting in a catastrophic failure (tire, tube and rim) delaying him 24 hours. And Shemp had a leak indicator on his dash. He still limped in to Jacksonville and I can only hoped he made it home.

But still, the trailer did show up, we had a full crew to assemble and we had an orderly build. And so we left it, built and ready, for Show Day Saturday.

Typical scene you could see just out the hall’s back door, engines under 95 (Photo: Alex B)

While Burger Fi was great, the later dinner was not. Hawkers. I mention them by name because they have a restaurant here in Orlando that gave me food poisoning a few years back. Here, they just decided that three older couples who’d walked a long quarter mile to get there were not worth serving. We stood on the sidewalk outside for almost ninety minutes while one group came and went in (reservations) and a group of young twits sat at the only other table and gasbagged the evening away. Finally we had to just limp it for home, only to find that Jimmy John’s (which we’d decided not to go to on the way out) got their petty vengeance on us by closing early. So there.

So it was overpriced lobby junk food that night.

Home-boy Chad put’s his Tippy-Train on the tracks. Good luck with that (Photo: Jim M)

But this blog is about trains, and the next day was trains. But almost not. That layout we’d left running suddenly wasn’t (on the northbound line between the fake diamonds and the Jacksonville Amtrak Station). After some poking around, Steve and I figured that the lead that came from underneath was intermittent. A quick bit of trackside soldering and we were up and running, a touch late (9:05 AM) but hey, on railroad terms that is virtually dead on the dot.

And so we ran and ran. For a distant show, we really had a lot of members, especially the young guys who showed up for us and ran lots of trains. I don’t think here was a time when I found less that four trains on the main, and pretty much everything was rolling on yellows. Of course, Chad and Reverend Jim shared that “so how do you like it” smirks for our long drives. But everyone ran, there were few problems and lots of smiles.

I’ll mention that for you folks with dangling air hoses, that was our primary problem encountered. A lot of people were snagging (and even shorting) because of it. Please clip these things (or at least bend them up). The train you delay with your problems might be mine.

Black widows snapped by a Train Widow. Hubby’s Daylight roars outbound from Waycross (Photo: Jane R)

And speaking of mine, I finally broke out of the yard and ran my daylight coaches with black widow head-ends. I guess I don’t get to run much because a lot of members were commenting on it. Someone even asked if I needed a conductor (smartass). Still, my old DT400 was still giving me fits down at the Folkston end. John C loaned me a new single-knob throttle and let me scoot around the layout. The realization that I’d previously been holding a handful of old junk came as a flashbulb to me. The action was smooth on the knob, the contact steady, and the train handling a delight. I liked it so much that I bought a DT602D (i.e. with helper knob included) from TRF and John was nice enough to spare me the set-up by doing it himself. Of course, this started a lot of smirky comments about “So when are you going to get a smart phone?”. Who knows; maybe I’ll dumb myself down and get one.

The audience seemed quite enthusiastic with us. After all, our layout was smack in the middle of their town. From the loading dock, you could see the double-girder 95 bridge right behind us. Of course, our layout does not have the later extension for the hall we were in. That was a scenery decision I made to not overpower the scene. Still, people liked the whole setup. The manager of the building even gave me a cookie tin of the building as a small token of thanks for showing. But back on topic; the crowds loved us, we were busy all day and everyone (participants  and visitors) had fun.

A show marked with tragedy. Probably a coach blew a tire. (Photo: Leonard J)

I’m not sure how much we made off the tables; Greg will report on that once he Count de Money.

We’ll see if we’d like to do this again next year. We didn’t make much off it and didn’t get too much interest in new memberships (understandable) but it was a great deal of fun and we lived up to the spirit of our 501c3.

Thanks to all who made this show one of our best!

>>>AND YOU CAN SHOW YOUR THANKS TO ME BY BUYING A BOOK!<<<

That night, the younger guys went north to Folkston to train-watch the night away. Me? I got home and slept for 11 hours. (Photo: John C)

Find of the day. Dinosaur bones north of Folkston. The Smithsonian has already made an offer. (Photo: Jane R)