To Shiny Rails

Thanks to Karl Hovanitz (Bitter Creek Western Railroad), the Foster family got a tour today of the Norgrove Railway being built just south of Arroyo Grande, CA off El Campo Road. Here’s a website address: https://norgrovetraintours.com/. They’re doing some incredible restoration activity of (very) old equipment and putting down a brand new 600mm track. They’re setting up for rides and events!

This was today’s Parlor Car Chat for the San Luis Obispo Railroad Museum.

This was today’s Parlor Car Chat for the San Luis Obispo Railroad Museum. Greatest chat on earth, really!

Omaha’s Durham Museum is in the 1930-vintage art deco railroad station. Quite the building and a considerably interesting museum inside. I was thoroughly taken by the statues throughout depicting life-in-action at the station at various periods of time. There was a traveling exhibit there this day of Pulitzer Prize winning photos. Fascinating. And a real soda fountain with real hot fudge sundaes, which we had to try. All my photos are here.

Lynn and I stopped in North Platte, NE on the way to Omaha for a reason… To visit the Bailey Yard and the Golden Spike Tower. Wow, that’s one big yard! All the photos are here.

While the boys caught fish in Palmer Lake, I caught this UP Heritage Fleet locomotive #1989 rolling by Palmer Lake with a unit train of windmill blades. Thanks to the guys on the bridge that let me know it was coming. I noted a bunch of railfan-looking guys with cameras (you know the look) on the pedestrian bridge over the tracks to the lake and asked if anything special was coming. They didn’t say what, but they did say it was three trains away coming from the north. It came by a little over an hour later and was indeed the third train to go by. You should always keep your radio scanner in the car.