Kevin Standlee: Fandom Is My Way of Life

It was a difficult day to be a remote travel agent. Lisa and Chris were in Oslo, planning to take the Bergensbahen (Oslo-Bergen) train on Thursday. However, the line was closed due to one of the snowsheds along the line having caught fire on October 7. They need to be in Bergen by early afternoon on October 11 to catch a ferry from Bergen NO to Hirtshals DK. To get to Bergen, they needed to make their 08:25 train on October 10, for which they had a reservation.

I took a nap for a couple of hours in the afternoon, knowing that I was going to have to be in a place to possibly redo some of their hotel reservations. One possibility would be to go to Stavanger instead of Bergen, spend the night there, and then catch that same ferry (which calls at Stavanger on the way to Hirtshals), albeit that this would throw away half of their booked ferry journey.

As of twenty minutes after their booked departure time of 08:25 CEDT, it appeared (as far as I could tell from here) that their train for Bergen had left. The infrastructure operator, Bane NOR, had been frantically working to reopen the section of the line that closed. They originally predicted a 03:00 reopening, which kept slipping, and as of the time I gave up and went to bed (having heard nothing from Lisa or Chris for a while; remember that they don't have mobile phones and only limited email connectivity) the reopening had slipped until at least 09:00. (The closed section was several hours west of Olso, starting at Ål.) Even if they couldn't get the line open by the time the train got there, Vy (the train operator) had a two-plus-hour bus bridge around the closed section, but that's also not optimal.

I know that had I been in their shoes, I would have got on that train and hoped for the best.

[Backdated entry]

After one day of recovery, it was time to set off again, but just for one night, this time in Aberystwyth. I was able to pack more lightly, using my smaller bag for this trip. We had two train trips planned for this portion of the trip, the first one short but steep.

( Read more... )

We walked back down the seafront and checked into our hotel. As it was now later in the day, lots of people had started to leave, we we were able to move the vehicle from nearly the end of the pier that made up the parking area to nearly the head of it, in order to save us time moving stuff back and forth.

( Beach Picnic )

It was a surprisingly tiring day, probably because I'm not really recovered from Worldcon yet. I was grateful that our hotel room was only a stone's throw from the beach party. Getting to sleep was was not a problem.

In the midst of our Worldcon trip, we've dropped a new episode of Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories



This month, we're talking about how track stays on track.

We continue to try and claw our way back to a once-a-month schedule with an episode about how the railways handle snow.



Appropriately, as I was editing this episode this afternoon and evening, it started snowing, dropping wet snow, but again only 3-4 cm. The weather forecast is such is that I expect that most of it will melt tomorrow.

No disclaimers on this post. As far as I know, Worldcon Intellectual Property has not asserted any right to control my railroad videos or to punish me for talking about rotary snowplows.

In my quest to get caught up on our schedule, here is the most complicated (in terms of number of pieces of material) video I've ever edited.



Kuma Bear makes a special guest appearance; actually three appearances, if you watch closely. I suspect that it will not be his last. This also gave me an opportunity to learn how to do zooms in video. I continue to learn more and more about editing as I do this.

Once I got the hang of how I wanted to illustrate the dozens of different types of locomotives by using the diagrams that Lisa did plus photos of each type (some found by Lisa, some by me, another others that we've both taken during our travels), it wasn't all that difficult, but it was time consuming. Again, we're talking about one hour of editing time for each minute of video.

As I mentioned, some of these photos are from our personal collection. For example, the picture of the one-of-a-kind "Texas" type locomotive, Santa Fe 5000, is one that we took on a trip across Texas years ago.

The studio portion of this and the next episode were recorded before we got the new studio lights. Lisa is working on how to mount the lights to properly light our "set."

There's no rest for me now, as I need to start working on the next episode. If all goes as planned, I should be able to get it out by the start of next month, getting us back on schedule.

Today was our day to visit the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Illinois. This is about 60 miles west of downtown Chicago and challenging to access without a car, so I rented a car from the Hertz agency in the lobby of the Hyatt Regency this morning for the day trip. Lisa, Kuma, and I were joined by Feòrag, who arrived last night with her partner Charlie Stross. Charlie decided not to come with us, but chatted with us while we waited for the car to be brought up to us.

As the car's fuel tank did not appear to have enough fuel to make the round trip, we elected to find a BP station (I received as a gift some BP gas cards, and I can't use them at home because there are no BP stations in Nevada). Aside from my making a wrong turn that required a bit of hunting around to get us pointed in the right direction, this was not that difficult, and I ended up putting more fuel than we ended up needing into the car, but that's okay. We set out west onto I-90, slogging through slow traffic until suddenly everything opened up and it was 70 mph until we got to US-20. Lisa navigated us through the rural roads to Union, and we were there shortly after they opened at 10 AM.

I wish I had the energy to label and categorize all the photos I took, but I'm really worn out. Lisa also took piles of photos. I expect that you will see some of this turn up on Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories in the future.

We rode on the IRM's demonstration railway on a Chicago, Aurora, and Elgin interurban car, which I enjoyed, and then we started walking through the huge collection they have there. Even spending four hours at the museum, we didn't get to see everything. It was fascinating, though. I now have seen one of the two Electroliners in person, and have been up close to a "Little Joe" and a GG1 electric locomotive, neither of which I've ever seen except in pictures.

I wish we could have stayed longer, but we had to have the car back before 5 PM and we'd been warned that the inbound traffic was going to be bad (thanks, folks), so shortly after 2:30, we turned back to Chicago. This also went as predicted, taking about two hours to drive sixty miles, including a slow crawl to finally get to the exit to take us back down to the Hyatt. We arrived at 4:30, with plenty of time to hand the keys back to the rental counter, at least once I disentangled myself from the Hyatt employees who were trying to sign me in to valet parking. Eventually the valet heard me saying, "No, I'm not parking this car with you; I'm returning it to the Hertz counter inside your lobby!" (I did later get the return receipt from Hertz, so that's fine. Tolls from I-90 are collected electronically and billed later.)

We bade Feòrag goodbye (they're in the other hotel tower from us), dropped our things in our hotel room, and made another trip to Bockwinkle's grocery down the street for stuff for dinner. (Expect this to be a common refrain on this trip.) We made dinner out of what we bought, and were happy to have it. We are really glad we made the trip out to Union, and I'd love to visit the place again, but we're very tired, and also very glad that we don't have early-morning commitments tomorrow, so I don't have to set an alarm. Sleeping in is on our agenda for tomorrow.

Westercon 74 overwhelmed our lives sufficiently that getting a new episode of Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories out was very much on the back burner. Fortunately, we recorded what you might call a "filler" episode last year for this very reason, and we therefore managed to get an episode published in July.



Getting an episode out in August is going to be similarly challenging, but we do have plans.

This month, Railway Legends, Myths, and Stories talks about the subject that was one of the reasons we started making these videos, that being a discussion of why most railway tracks are 1435 mm apart rather than some other distance.



And no, it has nothing to do with the width of Roman chariots.

We initially planned on posting Railway Legends, Myths, & Stories videos every two weeks, but at the moment, and at least until we get Westercon 74 behind us, I don't expect to do more than one per month. The latest episode is now online.



In this episode, we take on what we consider the first steam railroad. Like many things, it's not a simple answer.