Bernhards Random Ramblings BACKUP

After hanging out at CDG terminal 2G for 6 hours or so, having lunch, watching planes land and take off, dozing off a couple times, and staring out more into the rain, it was finally time to board AF1808 to Stuttgart. I dozed off some more while we were still climbing out of Paris. By the time we got to Stuttgart, I was reasonably awake again, managed to stay awake until after 10pm, and slept through the night.

A quiet, event-free flight. We took a fairly flat route south of Greenland with no interesting views. The weather at Paris CDG is rather miserable. Final approach was bumpy, with low clouds, but not as vomit inducing as it could have been.

Sure, let's do that.

Going to work in the early morning hours of the day. I love it when the sunrise is already lighting up the sky, but the valley floor is still dark.

Under dark clouds, the siding at Fallon station is occupied This is the second day of the LD/Ops SIG meet. I got to operate at Jim Providenza's Santa Cruz Northern layout, one of the early operating layouts in the San Francisco Bay Area. The SCN operates using Time Table and Train Order (TT&TO) rules. Hey look what is that chair doing under the helix? That's one of the station operator positions. Desk, fast clock, telephone system, paper work, as well as the interlocking and train order signal control switches are ready to get to work. This is actually a quite comfortable work space. I was the conductor on Extra 2630, the "Cementipede". This sounded like a neat job in the description. It comes with the drawback that it's an extra, and thus is at the bottom of the pecking order in TT&TO. As it happened there were multiple higher priority trains on the schedule, and we spent a long time in the hole at Holy City. When it was finally our turn, we took off, an...

This year's Layout Design and Operations Special Interest Group (LD/Ops SIG) meet was again at the Elk's Club in Alameda. The setting is very nice, and the talks interesting. Clif Linton talked about various kinds of modern petroleum products movements, and appropriate ways to model them. Tony Thompson gave an overview on modeling freight traffic. Al Daumann's presentation on how to add additional actions to enhance operations on small layouts felt very appropriate for my Welztalbahn . I'm going to try out his ideas around simulating passenger and mail traffic, maybe expand it to express shipments, too, so that operators of my regional and long-distance passenger trains have a bit more to think during their respective runs. There was a design challenge for the Alameda Belt Switching layout. Ray DeBlieck gave us an entertaining and very personal introduction to the prototype. I spent a good part of the afternoon with a layout design consultant to discuss my Murrbahn pro...

Back in September I had placed some climbers at Mt. Nicholls temporarily. They were well-received, so today I added a couple permanent scenes.  I wanted to place them in a way so that they could be discovered only on second look, and wouldn't be totally in your face. Thus they are somewhat hidden in the rock face behind the big bridge. 

With most car cards done, I needed to finish the folders to hold them before I can start building trains and get the Welztalbahn operational again. Making progress on that front. The folders are color-coded, yellow for local passenger trains, orange for long distance trains, blue for local freight, and purple for transfer runs.

A christmas present I brought back home is this Brekina model of a Mercedes Benz L 406 D van. Out of the box it looks very ... clean. Let's fix that. I have a sheet with license plate stickers. Apply them to front and rear. This was the first time I applied license plates to a car. The effect is subtle, but very effective. Following photos I found on the Internet, I painted the mirror arms and back black. For the actual mirror I used aluminum metallic paint. Here's the before photo of these rather tiny parts... While at it, I also painted the tires flat black. Finally, I tried to apply only a very light dusting of pan pastels to show a slightly dirty, but rather new working van. In the end it got a little bit dirtier than I had planned, but I can't really complain.

The flight boarded on time shortly before noon. I like the effect of backlit shots Somewhere over the north atlantic ice sheets. No arrival photo in SFO, as usual, because they have no windows in either the jetway or arrival corridors.

No signs of inclement weather, just very low ceiling as we're on final approach to Copenhagen. I'm amused about the size of the "Fire and Fury" display at WHSmith's. I get to hang out at the airport for a couple hours before it's time for the long-haul flight to San Francisco.

After spending over a month Europe, it's time to go home.

Yes, I'm thrilled. Just in time for the lunch break it started snowing, so I went outside for 5 minutes afterwards and enjoyed the falling snow. Despite the fresh snow it's fairly warm. The snow flakes are big, heavy, and very wet.

For a team dinner tonight, we headed over to Le Dezaley. They are known for their yummy cheese fondue, among other things, and of course I couldn't not choose that.

Today I went on a round-trip through Switzerland by train. The route started in Zurich-Enge, via Zug to Aarth-Goldau, Erstfeld, and Goeschenen on the Gotthard line to the north portal of the Gotthard tunnel. From Goeschenen I took the Matterhorn Gotthard Bahn (MGB) to Andermatt and on to Brig, traversing the Furka base tunnel and an amazing winter wonder land. From Brig I continued on the Loetschberg line through the Loetschberg tunnel to Kandersteg where I observed the auto loading operations for cars going through the tunnel. After experiencing the Loetschberg tunnel two more times I continued to Bern and back to Zurich. I used a SBB day pass for this 11 hour round trip, with a couple breaks. All the trains I took ran at least once per hour on Sundays with well-planned connections making it easy to plan the trip. Because this is the middle of winter with only about 7 hours of decent daylight, I planned the day so that I would have daylight by the time I got to the Gotthard tunnel, cl...