Sunday, January 29, 2012

Sprngfield

The great model train show that is. It's so great that I drove down, some three hours, and so as not to miss anything, I got up early and had the Mercury on the road at 0600. It was still pitch dark, sun rise didn't happen til 0700 and by that time I was over on I91 headed south at 80 mph. Sunrise was lovely and surprisingly brief. Lasted about ten minutes and then it was daylight.
By the way, I don't believe all that stuff about crumbling infrastructure crying out for money. I91 was pot hole free, fresh black asphalt, not too much traffic. Not like New York which is a state of potholes.
The show was huge. It was in the Eastern States Exposition in West Springfield. It filled four big exposition halls with running train layouts and vendors selling all things railroad, from striped engineer hats to railroad lanterns to $1000 brass steam locomotive models. My feet managed to survive all four halls and five hours. They filled up all the open land with parking. I saw plates from NJ, NY, MA, CT, NH, Quebec and Ontario. Like maybe a third of the plates were from out of state. Crowd was easily in the 100,000's. The aisles were jammed, mostly with seniors of my generation and grandchildren. The kids were all well behaved, well dressed, and skinny. If there is a childhood obesity problem you couldn't prove it by this crowd.
A fun day, and the cat was overjoyed to see me when I got back.

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