Roaring Of Trains II

Howdy!

Today I have another one of those posts that was fun but also very bittersweet to write, because it has something to do with my papaw. Basically anything to do with trains, just upsets me a bit. I had a difficult time holding back tears when I watched Nat and Wes (and the rest) vlog of their twins’ Liam and Judah’s birthday, because they got a mini train track and it was just a little too sweet for me to bear!

Last year, I wrote a blog post when my northern family went and took many, many pictures of the 767 Nickel Plate Locomotive Train that the Fort Wayne Historical Society had restored, they gave out rides of some of the passenger cars and showed other weathered down trains that were just placed in random areas on the track. My knowledge of trains only goes so far unfortunately, but I do find them fascinating!

This time, my cousin Kristi wasn’t pregnant and so she got to go to the event and even brought little baby Joseph along! We have to start them young! He’ll probably be introduced to Thomas the train first to get him familiar with them and when he’s older then maybe his papaw or Uncle Chris will show him the importance of the model trains and maybe one day he’ll have himself a large set up like his great-grandpa who knows!

As I’ve tried to explain in the past, trains are a big thing in my family. My papaw was obsessed with them! He seems to have gotten his love of trains from both his father Gene and his grandpa George (I like to call him “Papaw George”) because we have old photos of random trains in black and white and they’re very old and fragile. My aunt scanned a fairly good chunk of family photos of us plus some of my papaw’s relatives, like his parents and the infamous aunts you’ve heard me talk about over the years! We’ve found quite a few pictures of papaw as a youngster climbing the caboose of a train and looking at it in awe, he couldn’t have been more than five or eight years old, but it’s so hard to tell because of how scrawny he was!

I would love to go to one of these events, we find a smaller train that allows rides but those are pretty expensive compared to the tickets to this event. I’ve already been on a train, if you want to call it that. We went to the Children’s Museum in Indianapolis years ago as a field trip and I was still technically healing from my surgeries, it hadn’t been a half a year yet and so I wasn’t allowed to go on very many rides at the time. However, my mom and I found this old train and it had screens inside the windows to make it seem you can going places, it rocked back and forth which made mom really worried at times. I think we sat there for two or three rides and that was good enough for me.

My friend Danielle, she went to the National Railroad Museum in York and she wrote three separate blog posts of her visit there and the pictures turned out amazing! I feel I would enjoy it more if it was indoors, my dad would probably do better with it too because hopefully it wouldn’t be so hot, but the only thing that would suck if that the trains itself wouldn’t be able to run like they do at these events in Fort Wayne. And why do they always have to be so damn far away?

Okay, I’m going to shut up now and show you some of my favorite pictures that my cousin Amber and Uncle David took while they were there this past month!

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Roaring Of Trains

Hi everybody!

So today, I have a very sweet post to share with you. Back in July, I guess some of my northern family found this event floating around on Facebook, it was called “Fort Wayne Railroad Open House” and it was a fundraiser ran by the people of the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society. They restored a Nickel Plate steam locomotive called the 767, after it was in a really bad accident in 1951, which you can read about here.

Trains were a little popular in my family, reason being my papaw grew up in the late 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. At the time, trains were used quite a bit, but I don’t necessarily remember him ever having to ride a train. I’m pretty sure it was always a bus whenever he’d visit both sides of his family. If he did or didn’t ride one, he still loved the crap out of them! So the fact that several members of my family went to this was kind of cool and bittersweet at the same time. We all knew that my papaw was with them, probably having a field day too!

There were three different trains on the grounds. A diesel passenger caboose, The Wabash, and The 767 which was the main event because it’s huge! I’ve always considered my cousin Chris pretty tall, but when a train makes him look like a shrimp, that’s big! My family took a short ride on the caboose, it was a cute thing for my younger cousins. They’re not that old to think riding on a train is weird.

Unfortunately, I don’t know much about trains. I think they’re cool, but mostly because it’s a traditional way of mobility before they came up with automobiles and airplanes. The only trains that I see are the ones that stops us in the afternoon, bringing coal out of the mines. I wish there were more passenger trains around, because I’ve always thought they were interesting! Which is one of the reasons why I’ve always loved the beginning of the Harry Potter films, because they have to go to Hogwarts Express and sit on the beautiful red and black train to go to school, whereas I had to ride on the short bus!

The 767’s a steam locomotive and the railroad is connected from Chicago to Fort Wayne and then finally stopping in Buffalo, New York. So if you’re going from Chicago, IL to Buffalo, NY that is a long trip! I’m guessing probably three or four days on a train. Luckily, I love cruising, so that wouldn’t bother me too much!

Below are several photos that my family let me use for this post!

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Just A Thing Of The Past

Today has been a good day, but yet I’ve been feeling a little bit sad too, even though nobody knew I was. It’s been good because it’s my dad’s birthday but also I got to enjoy this beautiful day. I got to go outside and feel the slight breeze of the spring like wind and according to my papaw just before I left my nana’s house this afternoon the temperature was 52 degrees. Perfectly explains when my mom took me outside to go back home I go outside and my arms instantly get goosebumps because of the cold wind that just happened to pass by us. Of course, my mom thought it felt amazing because of the fact she was moving stuff around for a bit so she felt fine about it. I wasn’t expecting like summer weather, but I was hoping for something a little warmer though!

While I was at my nana’s I finally got to talk my mouth off. When my nana and I don’t see each other for a while, we tend to keep everything bottled up inside and when we’re around each other we just kind of explode! Poor Papaw gets right in the firestorm too. Sometimes, I include him the conversations and nana just ignores him. Well, after my parents left my nana got my soup ready. I wanted to have chicken noodle soup the last time I was there but we were kind of rushing, so I couldn’t have it then. In the mist of all that, my papaw turned on the TV and found men’s college gymnastics and he kept saying, “oh, I used to be able to do that!” The funny part is, I have no clue if he has or not. We were actually talking at the beginning and after I got done eating. My nana painted my toe nails in a teal and purple polishes. When she was doing my nails, I started hearing the music in the background and I knew the sound but I couldn’t figure out what it really was, until it hit me and I basically had a fangirl moment right there and then. They were playing “New Divide” by Linkin Park so just imagine my reaction and my nana’s too.

Once we were done and they were drying. I finally got to finish the rest of my cookies n cream ice cream. I’ve had it for a long time it seems like. When my mom went to the store today, this time I hope she got the cookie dough. I miss my cookie dough! Anyways, after I finished it and I actually everything today and I am freaking hungry now. Hmm. After I finished, we went into the living room because she needed some help with putting old VCR tapes into boxes. In the 90’s and early 00’s my papaw’s VCR still worked and he liked taping practically every basketball game that IU and Butler went up against but some weren’t old tapes like that. He’s got some train and airplane tapes as well. Including a certain tape that I find the most interesting, since I’m part of the whole age of DVD’s seeing a movie I know as a VCR tape format is a little weird. They had Apollo 13 as a VCR tape. They are just a thing of the past until you go to grab one off a shelf. I love to clean but being in my grandparents’ living room gives me the creeps. I cannot be in there by myself or I’ll just drive myself paranoid. It has always done that, while everybody in my family loved that eerie feeling you’d get like somebody was watching you up the stairs, I was basically stuck in the kitchen. Christmas mornings were always difficult for me because if everybody would one by one go into the other rooms, that feeling would find its way to you and just make you run right out of there. I did okay though, my nana knows NOT to leave my side while we’re in there. It doesn’t matter how busy I got, that feeling was still there.

I just went and checked my Facebook…in other words I am being distracted. I saw that someone had shared a picture of a weather map of the Midwest for tomorrow. It doesn’t matter how much we want a week of good spring weather, mother nature has to give us the middle finger and says, “no can do suckers!” If I didn’t know any better, I’d say she acted a little bit like Miley Cyrus. Anyways, my nana had said that tomorrow we’re supposed to get some pretty bad storms, and might produce tornadoes too. Well, I just got a glance at the picture and I saw the orange, red, and a dark blue. The blue means “violent tornadoes” and it is heading our way. So I’m hoping these storms will be nice and let me do my Five Sentence Fiction post before it decides to let loose. So if you pray tonight, please pray for everybody in the Midwest and if you don’t pray, just send some positive vibes our way! Enjoy your night and Thursday!