My wife and I just returned from a two-weeks whirl-wind vacation to
North Carolina, Virginia, Delaware, and New Jersey. We watched the
oldest granddaughter graduate from college.
I got to spend a day with Bill Lane this past week, meeting him, his
wife Donna, and their three "children", Pickles, Shelby, and Rosie. It
was an enjoyable day. Bill showed me a lot of his brass engines, and we
even got to run some trains on his new layout. His layout is a large
club-sized oval layout in his basement. He had me running a freight
train with four S Helper F units. The train itself stretched out over
more than 50% of his mainline. At one point he told me to pull on the
lead freight car (uncoupled from the engines); I couldn't move the
train, it was *that* heavy! However, the F units showed no signs of
strain. Bill ran two trains on the other mainline and did some switching
work with an AB set of brass FA-2 engines. It sure was a treat to get to
see the models in person that he shows on his web site.
Bill also took me for a quick tour of the SMS facility in New Jersey:
http://www.smsrail.com/index.html
It is my understanding that this is a local freight service line that is
owned by railfans, so they tend to use restored, older engines. While we
were there, there was some switching taking place and an ex-PRSL engine
was in the shop, minus a motor.
All in all, it was a good day, and a wonderful vacation. We drove over
3,500 miles but it was good to visit with family. Now I need to get back
to work on getting the NASG web site updated. Oh, and wash off our share
of insect-population-control from the front of our truck!
- Peter.
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Peter Vanvliet ([email protected])
Houston, Texas
http://pmrr.org/ (my model railroad - RSS feed <http://pmrr.org/rss.xml>)
http://fourthray.com/ (my company)
http://houstonsgaugers.org/ (model railroad club)
http://nasg.org/
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