Train Wrecking as a Hobby

[kevin_standlee]

The special Trains Issue of The Drink Tank is out, including my story, "The Day I (Almost) Wrecked a Train."

A couple things that have come up since I submitted the story:

• There's a word missing in the last paragraph of the second column of page 19. It should read, "We didn't have to move the tram very far...." That one is my fault, not Chris'.
• Lisa wasn't driving the electric locomotive. She was standing on the locomotive's outer platform serving as a lookout for the driver, whose view of the tram we were trying to re-rail was blocked at certain angles

Also, I was telling this story to someone during WFC, and she said, "But that's not a train." Actually, it is. The railroad operating definition of a train is "one or more locomotives, displaying markers." Self-propelled vehicles like a tram count as a locomotive. "Markers" are the lights or flags displayed at the front and rear (usually white to the front, red to the rear). There need not be multiple cars or locomotives in the train. Thus a set of boxcars sitting on a siding is not a train, while a single locomotive with markers is a train. So a single self-propelled vehicle counts as a train.

(Yes, I know the museum ground aren't quite the same thing as a common-carrier railroad attached to the larger railroad network. Besides, it's a better title the way I wrote it.)

I'm glad Chris was delayed a few days on this issue and that inspiration struck during WFC, and that I had enough time in the Press Office to write the story, because I would have felt very sad if I of all people had missed the Train Issue.