Last night on the way home from work, I passed a freight train with a hundred or so covered hoppers, coming from one of the many DeLong elevators located along the Harvard Sub.

It's not often that I can recreate what I saw 18 hours ago, but the guys at TrainSimulations just made that possible.

Two sets of ACF hoppers are out today -- one for CSX and one for UP.

Each set comes with 24 ready to run hoppers, suitable for a mostly modern setting with some CSXT...

Welcome to 2025! You might have noticed that things are mostly the same, but a little different around the edges here and there.... The upgrade to vBulletin 6.0.8 was done Tuesday, January 7th, and after 18 hours, the only issues that haven't been addressed and need some help from the vendor are some missing icons and scaling issues for the few folks who don't have a square avatar. Total downtime was..... 12 minutes. With no data loss and a fully supported product under the hood, I'm very grat...

'Twas the Night before Christmas, and all through the yard,
Not a whistle was blowing, not a steam plume stirred.
The engines, all silent, in slumber did sleep,
While visions of passengers danced in their dreams.

The rails, silver gleamed in the pale moon's light,
As signals stood frozen, no red to ignite.
No coal clattered down, no pistons did churn,
Only soft winter snowflakes softly did turn.

On the roundhouse roof, perched high with...

Here we are already at the end of November. Where has the year gone?...

While I try to do an article the last week of the month, that didn't happen for October.

That particular week, my wife and I were working on our property in Tennessee, and as can happen with any construction project, we ran a bit behind schedule. What should have been a three day project to build our first permanent structure (an oversized shed) turned into a week. While I thought I had all the supplies...

This month's SOTS comes to you from MP247 on the NS "Rathole", otherwise known as the Town Formerly Known as Nemo. While we've been coming down here for the last few months doing site prep, the last two weeks was particularly noteable, as we moved our RV onto the site, managed to get internet and water hookups, and almost daily deliveries from Amazon. The first week was all work -- burning brush, bringing down a few trees, burying a septic tank and clearing a path for the BobCat to make it t...