To those who know this story, sorry for the repeat. Hope I added enough new material to make it interesting.
(
The "Man of Few Words")
For me, it all started over in Germany back in '78 or '79. Not sure how, but I obtained blueprints of the the Bitburg railyard. I thought it would be cool to make a model layout of it.
Being a newlywed and in the Air Force, space limitations drove scale down to N. With what spare change I could gather, I purchased a handful of straight track, couple of switches and cars. Still did not have enough money for a loco or power supply, or a place the wife would let me set it up. As you learn later, perhaps she should have been a bit more open to and understanding of "train-love". My meager collection of layout parts all got placed in a three-foot box, which I STILL carry around 30 years later!
One
NASTY divorce and many years later, things remained in that box (and in my dreams) until '91. I was not yet "hooked" on railroads to the point we all are now, but the monster was sleeping within.
When Daddy passed on 19 November, 1991, one month short of his 90th birthday, I shipped his ashes (UPS, or was it FedX?) up to my sister who lived in Downers Grove, Illinois. I spent that year's Christmas break from work going up there for his memorial service.
The day I arrived, my sister and brother-in-law had an old AT computer with this weird game on it called
Railroad Tycoon. YEP, the original. I sat down about 3:00pm and did not leave the computer (and only from exhaustion) about 3:30pm
THE NEXT DAY ![yikes !*00*!](./images/smilies/yikes.gif)
.
To give the rest of the family computer time, I spent the week walking the four or so blocks up Washington Street to the train station and commuting into Chicago. I visited several museums on their free days and walked around the city a bit. Right up there pegging my fun meter with all the sights was the train ride back and forth. The "hook" was setting deeper.
I bootlegged RRT, which at that time would fit on a 1.1MB diskette using
pack and
unpack. Remember those pre-WinZip routines? Since I had no home computer yet, I would unpack it at work, play during lunch and after work, then pack it away for the next day.
After a while the fun wore off and it was shelved. Then, a train-related event happened at the end of June, 1996 that solidified my love for railroads (sick as some may think it is). My oldest daughter, who I had not seen for six years, and who was
prevented to have almost any communications, called me at work telling me her mother had been killed by a train! An example of the estrangement, she called the day AFTER the funeral. Guess the rest of the family did not want me there. It worked out better that way - - - I would have enjoyed it more than I deserved.
The story was, the ex-wife had gotten a job driving a contracted "taxi" for the then ATSF railroad, carrying crews to stations along the Clovis Sub. I thought this was strange because she was SUCH a BAD driver, whoever gave her that job should have been piss-tested!
On the Sunday night of, 30 June 1996, she was called to deliver a crew in a 15-passenger van to Vaughn, New Mexico. If you have the MSTS Clovis Sub, you will notice the train station, mainlines north of it, and two sidings set back a bit north of them.
At first I could not figure why the hell she was in the yard in the first place! The highway and station were SOUTH of all tracks. Did she not drop them off at the station? Best I can figure, she had to deliver the crew through the yard to locos parked on one of those sidings. In addition to her bad driving skills, it was obvious she had not been trained in yard operations and safety. This helped a bit in the settlement which netted each kid about $16K each.
Too bad her new husband of ONLY six months (who the kids hated) got that much COMBINED and perhaps more. Stupid inheritance laws!
Lucky for them, she delivered the crew and was stopped in the yard for a slow-moving westbounder on the north main. When it passed, she proceeded over the overcross and got splattered by the 60mph eastbound freight coming on the other track. That train was lead by
ATSF-4019, a GP60 which later got repainted to BNSF-8719. MANY pictures of it, both before and after the incident can be found on the Internet. This is my
favorite.
Being out in the middle of nowhere-New Mexico (the MSTS Clovis Sub is more generous for buildings than Vaughan really has), she had to be taken to Santa Rosa, about an hour away. She expired in route.
This all happened six months after I remarried. My new wife, her 11 year old and I now inherited three TEENAGERS (18-16-14) and all the "fun" that entails. These three literally came from a different culture than they had left eight years before. Needless to say, the TRAIN ended one and greatly changed six lives in an instant.
Anyway, in late 2000 I took a computer building class because Boeing paid for it and the computer each of us built was ours to keep.
![clap !**yaaa](./images/smilies/bravo.gif)
It was a cheap system, but hey, it WAS a system. Celeron 600 with . . . never mind, too old to remember.
One of the first (and few) games I bought was Railroad Tycoon II and was briefly back in the train game. Not having a computer before then, I missed RRT Deluxe. The old machine got me through RRTII, and MORE important got me hooked on the old Gathering forum and the still-hanging-in-there RairoadTycoon.Info.
I had as much fun observing Mack-the-Knife and Booneville quibble as I did playing the game!
![roll_laugh ^**lylgh](./images/smilies/lachliegen.gif)
More important, it established the base of you wonderful people out there. We are still together here mostly (or for some exclusively) because of
The Dawg.
By 2005, my three left home (one Navy, one Air Force, one married). However, computer time on the old machine was limited because of the step-daughter. Even MORE important, RRTIII was out and lack of computing power on the old machine really showed. It was time to put that computer class to use and build
MACzeane. She FINALLY had the power to do justice to the game.
Not sure when I got MSTS, but could not pass it up for $9.95 at Wal*Mart. This opened up more of the train world at 3DTrains and Train-Sim. I spend more cumulative time on our forums than either RRTing or MSTSing combined!
The real and cyber train world is all but infinite. Even a dozen lifetimes could only scratch the surface. Thanks to our community, we are scratching deeper than we ever could alone thanks to
Hawk and ALL THE REST of you.