It's All Relative

Lisa and I were talking last night and she told me she'd run across a list of the ten largest cities in Nevada. At the top was Las Vegas (no surprise). Reno was #3, after Henderson. At the foot of the list was a surprise: Fernley. Yes, Fernley is the tenth-largest city in the state of Nevada, at around 19,000 people. As I understand it, the gold-plated water-treatment plant that nearly doubled my property taxes this year (still less than $1100/year) is the consequence of overly-ambitious plans that would, if they had come to pass, led to Fernley growing to be the "Henderson of Northern Nevada," as an over-sized outer suburb of Reno. That never happened, and I'll be surprised if it ever does, but at least we know we have very clean water, and that's not to be scoffed at.

(BTW, a search for "ten largest cities in Nevada" returns a bunch of hits, none of which agree with each other, so it's possible that our city isn't actually in the top ten at the moment, particularly after the post-bubble outflux that lowered prices to the point where we could afford to buy Fernley House.)

Steam!

This past weekend, Lisa reminded me that I needed to let her know if Union Pacific was doing any special trips through Fernley, in particular one of their two steam locomotives. Subscribing as I do to the UP Steam Team's Twitter feed, I figured that would be sufficient. Well, you have to go look at Twitter to see what's there, and I hadn't been paying particular attention for the past couple of days, and it cost us. This afternoon around 1 PM, Lisa heard a steam train coming, and ran out to the front porch to see UP 844 and the UP business train running through Fernley. In fact, it appears that 844 may have been stopped about a mile away for half an hour or so, based on the schedule I found later. But since she'd had no warning, she didn't have the camera and so there are no pictures to show of UP's Big Iron heading down the main at speed across from our house. Lisa got a great view, however.

She said, "This was worth having no air conditioning in the house this summer! I love this house!"

844 apparently will be on display in Sparks tomorrow and will travel over the Sierra on Thursday on its way to Sacramento, where it will be at the California State Railroad Museum as part of the celebration of 150 years of the Union Pacific Railroad. I do not yet know what the planned route of the train after it leaves Sacramento will be. It may head back over Donner, and once I find out, I will give Lisa as much of a heads-up as I can.