dmaze

Actually got to relax over the long weekend. This is kind of unique; I seem to spend a lot of Mondays saying "right, I haven't relaxed all weekend". On Saturday, I went into the city without much of a point, but wound up wandering around the South End. The three SW corridor tracks inbound from Back Bay have a three-light-over-two-light type of dwarf signal I hadn't seen before (showing yellow over flashing red, medium approach, on two tracks); this doesn't really match up with the position-light dwarves at South Station, or the two-head tower signals inbound on the Worcester tracks. Visited Filene's, where there was lots of most things at 30-50% off but notable shortages in the shoe and luggage departments.

Sunday my plan was to play my game for a bit (Heritage of Kings: The Settlers), except I realized I was in a no-win situation against the scenario; I'll actually need to play this one again, building up a much huger force before charging in. But then Thor called and told me that there was a model train show at the National Heritage Museum in Lexington. This turned out to be Northeast N-Trak, a localish group that does N-Trak modules, so they had all of their modules set up. Many of them I had seen before at the Amherst model railroad show. Being neither a 6-to-10-year-old or a parent thereof, I was also right in the middle of the age range. They noticed that I was paying attention to them running things and mentioned that I should join; I might. ( observations )

There was also some gaming. I rode coffee to victory in Puerto Rico! (Though I should have ended the game sooner, and not needed to be mayor to activate a large building.) There was a very close game of, erm, Inca Rails, the bizarrely communist not-actually-a-crayon-rail game (for one, the Incas didn't have trains; it also has oddnesses like the "wilderness road" card that lets two of the four players build roads that don't line up with the map). I still think it's much easier to draw east or west than north or south, since the side players can easily build to both north and south but north and south can't build to each other and there's a lot of value in the game to being connected to cities you didn't necessarily build.

So yeah, that's pretty much a weekend. I didn't do a whole lot of work on my own train (I did a little), I didn't read a whole lot of Quicksilver, but I did get to do enough sitting on my butt and enough socializing to be content with it.

As promised, I made my way out to the Amherst Rail Society's Big 2005 Railroad Hobby Show in Springfield. It was...big, taking up three buildings at the Big E. There were many, many booths of people selling model railroad paraphernalia. I decided I didn't need any of it (right now my shopping list is just small things, my wish list is the MEC GP40, and I want to build my own DCC system) and so saved myself potentially vast sums of money.

But the big highlight of the show was the layouts. It looks like there were 14 layouts, in N, HO, O, and G scales. They were all very modular (which actually kind of makes sense if you're dragging things to shows). astra_nomer: there were a few booths that sold S-gauge things, I picked up a flyer from Port Lines Hobby Supply.

(All my pictures)

( Favorites out of the pictures, plus more commentary )

No longer having the on-campus photo dealing via LaVerde's and having too much pride to send my film through CVS or equivalent, I tried sending film off to York Photo Labs, on the basis of a comment in davis_square. They seem to have done a reasonable job, and it was pretty cheap ($20 for processing on three rolls of film, plus a CD); I probably want to apply some GIMPage to the result, though, to make it more suitable for monitor display.

At any rate, for those who follow chooblog, there are albums from before I made the table totally cluttered, the current state of the world, and the scenery demo track. There's also pictures from wandering around the Big Dig and North Station.

( Samples )

Being a modern geek, I set up a blog for my model railroad stuff. Last night I got as far as getting the woodwork done, after some minor intermediate disasters. I need to spend more time with the crumbly pink foam to actually get to the point of thinking about laying track.

EDIT: Thanks to obra, this is now chooblog. (Well, that gets everything on that blog, anyways, though there's not much else there now.) We'll see if I can make the RSS behave.