A few weeks ago my brother-in-law indicated that he'd like to bring my three nephews over to see my layout - it had probably been at least a year since they'd last been out to the house, and since that had been during my 40th birthday party, although trains were running, they weren't exactly a priority. I begged for a couple of weeks delay, both for conflicting events but also so I had a chance to clean up the house and fix a couple of outstanding issues on the layout.

I model the Willamette & Pacific Railroad (the prototype currently uses the name Portland & Western) in the central Willamette Valley of Oregon. As such, my prototype uses a version of the orange & black paint scheme used by it's parent company, Genesee & Wyoming (GWI).

A week ago, Joe Fugate hosted the first operating session on the Siskiyou Line in nearly a year... if you don't count the one he held earlier that day for the National Narrow Gauge Convention. 

Remarkably, there really weren't all that many operators that showed up (so Joe got to run trains), and several of the ones that did were first timers or visitors from distant lands. One even brought a trio of DRGW SD40T-2's that we used as the helper set that night.

 Okay, can I plead sleep deprivation? I haven't been to bed prior to midnight this week (which will change tonight) and I've been up at or before 7am every day (which won't).

 I'm reorganizing the photos I've already uploaded into subject/manufacturer directories, and I'm very annoyed that even with a fresh set of batteries installed this morning, I managed to run them out in my camera by noon. That's two hours of solid photography, btw. So I'm also uploading all that. Even a little video of Point & Shoot resolution.

 It's 8pm and my feet are achin' (it'll be much later by the time I get this posted).

 My morning started at 8am when Joe, Patty (Joe's wife), and Les Halmos (the advertising account manager for Model Railroad Hobbyist magazine) and I met in the Starbuck's at our hotel. A couple minutes planning and we wandered over to Hall D of the Anaheim Convention Center - or, more correctly, to it's entrance, as the doors would not open until 9am.

Today was an easy day - I only actually attended a couple of the clinics (so far), took a bunch of photos and videotaped stuff. Oh, and found out what I won at the silent auction.

I flew down to Anaheim from Portland this morning (absolutely problem-free trip) and after getting situated in the hotel (and calling Joe, who was out looking at layouts to tell him I was here) I went down and got my registration packet for the convention.

Hi there - some of you may already know me, and if you've gotten this far, all of you have seen my face. I'm the guy whose face Joe chose to grace the home page (among others) of the Model Railroad Hobbyist website.