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January 24, 2015

OpsLog – FEC – 1/24/2015

t hunched predator-profile low in the shadows, its unblinking ball-turret eyes rotating independently, watching for prey. Its twenty foot body yearned to feast on a hobo or railfan – either would do (the camcorders it could regurgitate). Beneath the shielding fen of lichen, it watched. The dull roar of something even bigger and more unstoppable that itself made it raise its head, its throat-sack ballooning in alarm. Something massive and blue growled along the forest line. Panicking, the creature made its mistake, bursting from cover to flee, directly in the path of the oncoming FEC engine… The first I knew […]

January 9, 2011

ShowLog – Deland – 1/9/2011

We had a disaster of train show a year back. We have an aging set of interchangeable modules which formed a looped three-track mainline. The scenery ranged from beaten to aged. The wiring looked like something on a telephone pole in post-war Italy. The trackwork was rocky. And it get into the crew area, you had to get on your knees on a cold concrete floor and crawl in. So, that disaster of a show – for setup nothing worked right; non-stop repairs, fixing this, grunting with that. It took us something like 12 hours to build the basic layout. […]