LD/Ops SIG meet 2016 - the day

It has become a tradition for me to go to the Bay Area Layout Design / Operations SIG meet the last weekend of January. This is the sixth year I'm going to this meet. Familiar faces abound and it was nice to catch up.

This year, the event was at the California State Railroad museum in Sacramento. The fee for the meet included entrance to the museum, so during a break I took a quick look around the first floor and was surprised to find a demonstrator unit of a Siemens Velaro High Speed train on display.

Nice idea, but couldn't they have chosen a less nasty color?

SP 4294 is usually photographed from the other end ...

Admittedly, when I read through the program yesterday, I was bit skeptical. However, the presenters pleasantly surprised with excellent talks and presentations. I learned a lot about trains on R Street in Sacramento, how to fill in missing knowledge and context for a layout from Internet photo research and Google Maps, and heard a very entertaining talk about applied TT&TO at an operations session at the La Mesa club in San Diego.

The presentations were followed by the resolution of the Operations Challenge, which yielded lots of discussion and continued straight into the Panel Discussion. After the official program wrapped up, I had dinner at Fanny Ann's in Old Town with a small group of fellow model railroaders, before we headed out to the layout tours.

Hilarious Restroom Doors at Fanny Ann's

Hanging out in the green house

After a meeting in a different building on campus, I hung out in one of the informal meeting areas and worked form there, rather than returning to my desk. Nice change of scenery.

Bearded Dragons: Coloring and Sealing the Grout

Now that I'm back from my business trip we restarted work on the terrarium furniture. We used craft acrylics from the local Michael's partially thinned with water to give the rear wall a bit more flair, and even out the coloring of the horizontal surfaces. We succeeded in maintaining the grain of the tile grout.

We have been struggling with what we'll do about sealing the structure, so that it can be cleaned easily and thoroughly when needed. Grout sealers from the hardware store are fairly aggressive stuff and likely don't go well with styrofoam. Thinned, water-resistant wood glue is often used for this purpose, so we gave it a try on the outside walls. It turns out the color darkens quite a bit when covered with glue, but otherwise it works well. Pascal didn't like how much the color darkens, so for now we finished up the outside. The lower edge of the side wall in the photo below has not been painted with glue while the patch in the middle has. The difference in color is quite obvious.

Painting with glue is really cool. At first everything is yellow, and as the glue dries it becomes transparent.

Lasers

I finally got around to installing a Christmas present from my lovely wife on my bicycle yesterday evening, and tried it out this morning on the way to work.

This new rear light has built in Laser diodes that project flickering lines onto the street behind me.  Very cool! I'm curious what the power consumption is like and how quickly the wimpy AAA batteries in the unit are depleted.

About to leave CDG

After the event-free first leg of the trip, AF 84 is almost ready for boarding. This was a very good and productive trip. Time to go home.

STR - CDG

We woke up early for the first flight from Stuttgart to Paris. My mother was nice enough to drop me off at the airport, despite slick and icy roads.

The first leg of the journey home is a quick hop with Hop Regional, an Air France subsidiary.

Arrival at CDG, Terminal 2G.

Yes, it's still dark at 8:00am in Paris.

"Bitte Karte stecken!"

The payment machines in the parking garage at Stuttgart Hbf must have been programmed by someone not fully familiar with proper German grammar.

Bitte Karte stecken!

That's like saying, "Please stick ticket".
Where's the QA team when you really need them?

Zurich - Stuttgart

Zurich Hauptbahnhof, one of my favorite train stations.

It is 14:25. The Intercity from Chur arrives and gets prepared for the continuing trip to Stuttgart in less than 10 minutes.

Since Zurich is a Terminus station, a new engine needs to be coupled to the end of the train to pull the cars to Stuttgart.

The train reverses direction again in Singen/Hohentwiel and now gets pulled by a BR101 locomotive of Deutsche Bahn. Since I now sat in the last car, between Singen and Stuttgart I spent some time in the rear vestibule and enjoyed the view. Yes, some of the other passengers in the car looked at me a little bit funny ...

In Rottweil, we are meeting the opposing Intercity 187 which has left Stuttgart at 14:29. Still quite a bit of snow on the ground.

 Intercity 184 arrives in Stuttgart 17:35, right on time.

The cars will stay here at track 5 for almost an hour and return to Zurich at 18:29 as InterCity 283.

Engimatt

Having a beer in the hotel bar. Thankfully, I'm inside, where it's nice and warm, but enjoying the  view of the patio.

On the way to work

Schloss Sihlberg in the morning

Stuttgart - Zurich

Conveniently, there is a direct Intercity train between Stuttgart and Zurich, so I just plopped myself into the seat in Stuttgart, and got up again 3 hours later at Zurich HB. I chose to catch the last train of the day on this Sunday evening, so I arrived at my hotel shortly before midnight after a quiet and event-free journey through a dark, frozen winter wonder land.

There's about half a foot of snow on the platform in Boeblingen

Rheinfall Schaffhausen late at night

Snow for Real Now

It has snowed overnight. When this Californian was giddy about the snow yesterday, he was thrilled today.

Since it is Sunday I had to drive to the bakery in Aldingen. Herr Kaltenthal has a snow mantle over his shoulders.

When I got back home it was still a bit overcast, with great light effects in the clouds.

Right after breakfast the sun came out. Beautiful. That is almost begging for a walk in the snow.

It's supposed to snow some more until tomorrow and then stay cold for a couple days.

A short while later, it was heavily snowing again, so I skipped the walk...

Snow at Home

It doesn't happen that often, that we have snow at my parent's place. Looks like I arrived just the right weekend.

Some snow flakes on cars and roofs when I went to the bakery this morning.

And now in the afternoon, it has started snowing again. Still nothing stays on the ground, but that's OK, by me. It's still pretty to look at.

London to Stuttgart by Train

Departure Hall at London St. Pancras International. I'm taking Eurostar 9126 to Brussels. Departure 10:58 local time.

The weather in the U.K. was cold, but beautiful. Lots of sunshine, making even an East Midlands train on the neighboring track look good.

Green pastures and blue skies on the way to Dover.

A very different sight in Belgium, shortly before Lille, the announced winter storm is moving in.

I really dislike the boarding and arrival procedures for the Eurostar. They try very hard to make the experience resemble boarding an airplane. Primarily due to security concerns there are dedicated tracks and arrival/departure halls separate from other trains. Getting from the Eurostar to the ICE at Brussels involves navigating a maze of hallways, and in the worst case walking the length of the train. Pretty lame, and not helpful if the regular time between connections is only 10 minutes. One would think that getting from track 2 to track 4 should be easily done in 10 minutes. ... I just barely made it, and walked through half of the ICE cars to my assigned seat while the train was already moving.
That said, this is still preferable over the other travel option via Paris, which would have involved  walking from Gare de Nord to Gare de l'Est in a winter storm.

Between Brussels and Aachen, the storm went to full force and the landscape turned white.

No snow down in the Rhine valley upon arrival in Cologne, though. The storm hadn't made it here yet.

Since I was at the front of the ICE, at Frankfurt airport station track 5, I could take a quick photo before it took off again.

Of course, departure track 6 for my next connection is at the other platform. Stairs up, stairs down. No need to hurry, the train is delayed and I could leisurely stroll to the right place on the platform.

Again, I somehow managed to be at the very end of the train when we arrived 10 minutes delayed to light snow fall in Stuttgart. It's good to be home.

London Underground

The London Underground is awesome.