My Lionel Nuclear Waste Car
Pete Albrecht drove out from Costa Mesa to spend Christmas with us, as he did two years ago, and of course when he's here we grant ourselves permission to be 14-year-olds again, at least with respect to toys. Our first stop was (as last time) Custom Railway Supply on Garden of the Gods Road, to pick up some Lionel track sections for this year's layout around the Christmas tree in the great room. On their used equipment shelf I spotted an interesting piece of rolling stock: a Lionel 6515-4 Reactor Fluid Transport Car, complete with an imaginary AEC insignia and the slightly puzzling legend, "When empty please return to the disposal site." Nonetheless, having been a highly contrarian fan of nuclear power for forty years now (since before ignorant condemnations of nuclear energy became a lefty fetish, in fact) it was an item I just had to have.
The car is interesting in a lot of ways. The tank is made of transparent plastic, and contains a weird-looking purple-black pearlescent liquid that probably matches what most preteen boys hold as an image of radioactive waste. There's even a ball bearing rattling around inside it, to stir up whatever makes the fluid pearlescent again after the car sits in a box for a year between Christmases. (I'm guessing aluminum dust.) The trucks have working springs.
After we put up our first shot at a layout, Pete and I celebrated nuclear power by putting my new nuclear tank car in the midst of a Pennsylvania Railroad passenger consist and running it around the tree for half an hour, shunting it onto a siding periodically to calm down all the hysterical imaginary passengers, who had booked on in Philadelphia for an anti-nuclear protest in San Fran. Half-past Wyoming we told them to love nuclear or walk home in the dark.
Maybe we had had a few too many Pfeffernuss cookies; we didn't get into the spiked egg nog until later that evening. Pete brought out a lot of German goodies, and my sugar intake since Thursday is now rivaling what I generally allow myself over the course of an entire year. We're going to make German potato pancakes Christmas Day, and salmon in cream sauce the day after (or thereabouts.) Our next project is to build a couple of Estes model rockets and see if we can launch them somewhere without having to ask permission of the local paranoids. (That would be the police department, not NORAD, which actually knows something about rockets, heh.)
So our contrarian Christmas here is going precisely as planned. Carol is washing Aero, there's snow on Cheyenne Mountain, and God made Uranium too. All is well.