HISTORIAN, CRAFTSMAN, ARTIST, EVENT COORDINATOR.

In case you want to describe your model railroading in the style of a Linked In profile!

Building a model railroad can be a multi-year effort with many interdependencies. It requires clear goals, careful allocation of resources, planning, tracking progress, and adjusting as needed. For those working in clubs or building a home layout with friends, managing people is part of the job as well. Even those working alone may need to outsource parts of the project. In my case, that meant hiring contractors for room preparation and working with family and friends to build the benchwork and backdrop. A key part of project management is sustaining progress in a way that keeps everyone — including yourself — motivated.

There are many ways we can frame the pursuit of our hobby to help our friends better understand it. Before this discussion, had you stopped to consider all the skills you’ve built up over the years? Each takes time and energy to develop, but along the way you gain new knowledge, new abilities, and maybe even a few new friendships. Perhaps our non-model-railroad friends are right, and at times we really are just “playing with trains” — and that’s perfectly fine. But we know our hobby also gives us the opportunity to become historians, craftspersons, [c.q.] artists, authors, photographers, event coordinators, project managers, and so much more.

The play value in "playing with trains" is greater in any event to the extent that what becomes available for layout tours or operating sessions is a believable representation of something real, that runs reliably.

TAKIN' IT TO THE STREETS.

Summertime is for street parades, and we'll take in a few.

Let's start in Czajków, Poland, where the District Brass Band Festival features, as one might expect, local marching bands, as well as the high-stepping majorettes characteristic of recent Polish street parades.

Our next stop is Neuss-Rosellerheide-Neuenbaum, Germany, with Die große Sonntags-Parade in the June 2026 Schützenfest.

Try not to think about marching on Poland.

We'll wrap in in Peru, Indiana, where the Circus City Festival Parade took place Saturday last.  The parade, in the fashion of small city summertime parades throughout These United States, includes fire apparatus, civic and political organizations, businesses, and the local schools' marching bands.  Taken together, the parade takes ninety minutes to pass.  Saturday was a hot day.  I found a shady spot with a decent view of the street, and recorded the circus-relevant units, particularly those involving horses, cages, or calliopes.  During the Circus City Festival, local young people demonstrate their skill in the circus arts, such as acrobatics, juggling, the trapeze, and the high wire.  Those performers marched, rode, or, as you will see, performed.

Half past July, and the blue norther teased its return last night. Sunsets are coming perceptibly earlier as well.

THANKS YET ANOTHER MILLION.

Cold Spring Shops opened early in September of 2002.

I'm not sure when Google started counting page views, their counter rolled to a million in April 2016.

Four years later, the second million was recorded in August of 2020.

A third million arrived in the middle of April, 2024.

That tally doubled early in July, 2025.

We recorded the next doubling in July, 2026.

Overnight, another million came in, running the counter past thirteen million.

I continue to have plenty of material to carry on about, or for algorithms to peruse.

To those live readers who are looking in, thank you for your interest.

RAILROADS, CONNECTING PEOPLE.

Union Pacific's Semiquincentennial Steam Tour cheered up Northeasterners.  Trains posted a photo gallery, complete with a photograph that longtime editor David P. Morgan would surely have hailed, showing the articulation principle at work, with the lead engine helping Big Boy bend the corner around.

Steve Smedley photograph retrieved from Trains Magazine.

Big Boy and Reading and Northern T-1 Northern 2102, a different sort of War Baby, ran a side by side excursion in advance of Big Boy's visit to Steamtown and an Independence Day event in Philadelphia.  The excursion also acknowledges the 1976 American Freedom Train, as sister engine 2101 was on the head pin east of Chicago.

A PARTY IN THE U.S.A.

The host countries are no longer playing in footie's World Cup, and it's likely that one of the usual suspects will hoist it (what good is a cup that you can't sip beer from, anyway?) next week Sunday.

Fans of those sides are still in the States, and let them enjoy another week of pop refills and ranch dressing and the other frowzier charms of These United States.

I can't stop listening to this song. Best thing that came out of the World cup being in the United States this year. 🇺🇸

Watching this compilation of fans from all over the world at the 2026 World Cup in America is so heartwarming.

USA USA USA 🇺🇸pic.twitter.com/mwAWzAKcsg

— Stock Mom™ (@stockmom) July 2, 2026

The ball is in the air.  Welcome, welcome, to the land of the free.

 JOIN

OUR HAPPY

INFORMED THRONG

TWELVE MILLION READERS

CAN'T BE WRONG!

PROCLAIM LIBERTY THROUGHOUT THE LAND UNTO ALL THE INHABITANTS THEREOF.

Yes, American Independence in all its incomplete, contradictory, tawdry, and uplifting glory.

Cold Spring Shops will be taking the rest of Freedom Weekend off.  That likely involves preservation railways, food trucks, concerts, and fireworks.  "Yes, Independence Day has become a contested holiday of late.  And yes, in the end of Chevron deference does this nation enjoy a new birth of freedom, this time from swarms of domestically appointed officers who harass the people and eat out their substance."

We'll see.  It is altogether fitting and proper that a celebration of the independence of a nation conceived in liberty and betting on emergence might be contested and messy.  Enjoy it all the same, and stay hydrated.

ACROSS THE CONTINENT AND TO THE MOON.

Less than a century after American Independence, a by-then continental country survived a second British invasion that involved a sack of its capital, followed a great civil war that tested whether such a country could long endure, and spiked down a railroad from Council Bluffs to Sacramento.

Within a century, men from Planet Earth first set foot on the Moon.

This year, the semiquincentennial of American Independence, another crew of astronauts launched from that nation again circled the Moon, and Union Pacific's Big Boy has gone east to participate in the Independence festivities.

It is only fitting and proper that the railroads participate.  The last surviving signer of the Declaration of Independence, Charles Carroll of Carrollton, laid the first stone of the Baltimore and Ohio on Independence Day, 1827 supposedly remarking that so doing was at least as significant, if not moreso, than signing the Declaration.  Railroad lawyer Abraham Lincoln authorized construction of the Pacific Railroad, while the country was engaged in a great civil war.  He chose a central route in consideration of the military exigencies of the times.  That chalking on 4014's smokebox door, "Big Boy" above a V-for-Victory, predates United States participation in the War, and yet, without the big steamers, moving men and material to ports on two coasts would not be as easy.  Legend has it that a German war prisoner, late in the War and being transported to the forests of the Pacific Northwest, it being the practice to offer prisoners an opportunity to earn money by assisting at civilian work, noticed a Big Boy on a nearby track, counted the wheels, and lamented that it would not be possible to defeat a nation that had locomotives such as those.  Not even, to crack wise for a moment, with rocket scientists that did the engineering for the Moon missions of the late 1960s. 

THE AMERICAN PROJECT.

Yuval Levin, "America’s 250th Isn’t Just a Birthday."

In celebrating America’s 250th, we are recommitting ourselves to a national cause that we did not choose but which we now see that we would and should choose.

We do this not because prior generations offer us a model of perfection—they certainly do not. We do it because they offer us a model of contending with imperfection and of striving toward the good and the true. This is what it means to celebrate our country this year: We affirm the rightness of the original choice made by prior generations by making that same choice again ourselves.

Our political tradition articulates the terms of that choice unusually clearly for us in the Declaration of Independence. We choose to live in light of the truth that we are all created equal, and of its implications. We haven’t always lived up to the standard of that truth, but it has always been there to hold us to account. We are a nation that, in moments of great national celebration, feels compelled to recur to that truth: to repeat it, to restate it, to recommit to it, and in that peculiar way to celebrate ourselves.

That’s the kind of celebration we should strive for this year. Call it a birthday, call it an anniversary, call it whatever you will. But treat it as an opportunity for mature, reverent reflection and judgment about the political tradition we are privileged to be part of and the nation we are privileged to belong to—an opportunity for gratitude, and therefore for hope.

Happy 250th.

Indeed.

MORE CHEST-THUMPING FROM THE NORMIES.

Maybe it's piling on to follow yesterday's "I couldn't help but notice that all these Europeans driving around being charmed by the U.S. are celebrating the very things that Leftists have the most contempt for" with today's "The Left Asked for This, It Got It, and I Can't Stop Gloating" by A. J. Christopher with Pajamas Media.

This summer, European visitors are falling in love with America.

Ironically, leftist insistence that Americans drop their predilection for brutish, uncouth sports like football and baseball and embrace a cultured, international sport like soccer brought this about. This push had nothing to do with the sport itself. If Americans loved soccer and the rest of the world loved baseball and football, leftists would be arguing for the opposite.

Okay then, what better way to expose us ignorant, backward Americans to soccer than to host the FIFA World Cup on our shores? We did just that, and the world came to watch.

And here is what the left expected to happen: Europeans were supposed to smirk at us. They were supposed to mock our religion and our guns. They were supposed to turn away in righteous disgust at our abundance and free refills and buffet lines and big trucks and big houses. They were supposed to shake their heads at our supposed lack of culture. They were supposed to see a racist behind every tree and under every rock. They were supposed to catch a glimpse of discord and poverty and hate and perpetual ignorance. And they were supposed to leave here hating this country even more so than when they arrived.

But they didn’t.

They fell in love with us. And by “us,” I mean the real, everyday America. They didn’t go to the Met Gala; they went to Walmart. They didn’t dine at the French Laundry; they ate at Waffle House. They didn’t scoff at bigger portions; they consumed them with glee. They weren’t impressed by Priuses; they were impressed by Ford F-150s. They didn’t sniffily order some 25-syllabled cup of pretention from the local fair trade cafe; they drank American beer, listened to American country music, and ate American bar food. They don’t marvel at inner-city legal drug zones; they marvel at the wide open expanses of American beauty.

They love ranch dressing. They love the military flyovers. They love the gas stations. They love the 24/7 business hours. They love the huge American flags

They love that America is so big, but not so much because of land mass and square footage. In those terms, Russia is big. China is big. But there is a bigness about America that isn’t measured in yardsticks. Anyone who has taken road trips across America can attest that you don’t just grasp the bigness of America. You grasp its openness. You feel free. It’s something you can’t explain until you’re immersed in it. And that feeling is reinforced through the welcoming friendliness of every drive-through town.

In short, everything our visitors love about America is everything the left hates about America.

Of late, the Europhiles and the self-styled progressives have offered the counter-argument that the big cities where the matches themselves take place are those places the Militant Normals like to refer to as crime-ridden slums.  That doesn't work so well, not with the Texas games in Arlington and the New York games in the Meadowlands and the Boston games somewhere down toward the Cape and the San Francisco games in Santa Clara. and the way the overseas teams get moved around, there are lots of opportunities to check out those Waffle Houses and Cabela's and the like along the way.

Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address Mr Christopher's conclusion is not.

So to the leftists behind the soccer push, your persistence has inadvertently led to the greatest PR success our nation has experienced since Tocqueville. Thank you, leftists, for bringing middle America and middle Europe together. Thank you for helping to demolish your own lies. Thank you for helping the world fall in love with us.

More than a few of the fans might be sticking around for Independence Day fireworks and concerts, and may they enjoy them.

FOOTIE HIGHLIGHTS THE NORMIES.

A week ago, we noted that Emergence, not European Technocracy, made possible the plenitude those World Cup tourists, who were probably not poor, marvelled over.  Now. in "Europeans in the US for the World Cup Are Celebrating American Culture—Specifically, Red America's Culture," Batya Ungar-Sargon tosses in a political economy lesson.  "I couldn't help but notice that all these Europeans driving around being charmed by the U.S. are celebrating the very things that Leftists have the most contempt for."

It is amusing, what with footie being this way for fans of distances in kilometers and long waits for medical procedures to be sports fans (and even the Fox network, broadcasting the games, has lots of announcers from overseas and even those native to North America use British dialect) and yet cling to their cosmopolitan snobbery, for the fans to get off on ... big box retail and all the pop you can drink!

[W]hat’s truly amazing is that these European admirers are enjoying the fruits of Red America—the exact things that the Left has the most contempt for: Walmart. Guns. Ranch dressing. Country music. People getting fat off fast food. The very things that Leftist elites love to deride about America, often from the vantage point of what a sneering Frenchman might say, are the things our European visitors are most admiring of, because they are the things that are most recognizably American.

Moreover, it's the infrastructure of the Suburban Experiment being hailed.  A week ago I flagged the possible downsides of exurban living eventually coming to light.  Thus far, though, none of the usual suspects, such as Streetsblog or Strong Towns, have gotten in touch with their inner social critic to fret about footie fans developing car brain.

SEE YOU DOWN THE ROAD.

Water for Elephants is a book that was adapted for a movie, and now there is a stage play.

I must confess that adapting a book where a lot of the action is on a train to a stage play is more of a challenge than adapting a stage play, Pressure, is to a movie.  The movie version of Water for Elephants made use of a steam train at a railroad museum as well as circus wagons from the Baraboo collection.

The stage version of Water for Elephants is performing in Chicago, and the cast recently visited Baraboo.  I can't embed the clip, which runs about a minute.  The museum has repainted most of the "Benzini" wagons, including the grease joint, back to more accurate colors reflecting their real owners.  The clip did not reveal whether the cast got a look at the one wagon still lettered for "Benzini."

ANOTHER WEEK, ANOTHER MILLION PAGE VIEWS.

Sometime during Fathers Day weekend our page view counter rolled through eleven million, a week since it rolled through ten million, a month since it rolled past nine million, and two months since it hit eight million.  Two million plus views counted in June alone.  I hope the algorithms are scraping nuggets of wisdom.  Individual posts still generally register forty to sixty views, and I trust live readers are making good use of them.  Thanks to viewers, human and algorithmic, for your continued interest.

ONE STEAMER GOOD, TWO STEAMERS BETTER.

On its way to an extended visit with a second Big Boy at Steamtown, Union Pacific 4014 participated in an excursion on Reading and Northern that featured one of the preserved Reading T-1 Northerns.

Not a sports post today… haha but super cool opportunity to see @UnionPacific Big Boy 4014 in operation! pic.twitter.com/y6QeWcLqVB

— Joey Draper (@Joeyydra1) June 13, 2026

Yes, the virtual train enthusiasts were thick on the grounds, and on the trains.

I just fucking love trains, bro pic.twitter.com/sDHRoVS5Cy

— Oops, all cherries! 🔜 AC (@Melvis_Barksy) June 13, 2026

Please indulge the enthusiastic language.

THE BOTS HAVE BEEN EVEN BUSIER.

I hope they are learning something.  Sometime during the Flag Day weekend our page view counter rolled through ten million, about three weeks since the counter rolled past nine million and about two months since the counter took a weekend stroll through eight million.  It's half past June and the page counter is nearly at a million for the month.

It's been the same pattern, episodes of activity in the tens of thousands of page views, interspersed by days with our more common experience of two hundred to two thousand page views in a day, and views of specific posts in the thirty to sixty range.

I extend my thanks, once again, to the two hundred to two thousand real readers who look in each day, and I surely don't lack for things to carry on about.  It's still likely that I'm going to carry on about how expensive ignorance is, based on the ongoing public conversations about data center construction.  Not today.

WHERE ARE YOU HEADED, BIG BOY?

Last week Tuesday offered fine weather for setting a lawn chair under a tree and watching trains.  Big Boy was expected out of Rochelle around 3.15.  The vagaries of railroading.  Union Pacific dispatchers threaded the special through freight traffic in both directions, including a Bird, loaded and empty hoppers, and Dead Freight.

Over the weekend, Union Pacific allowed Norfolk Southern pilots into the cab, and an expanded train with Norfolk Southern's America 250 diesel and several additional office cars set off for Philadelphia.

STEAMING INTO THE WEEKEND.

The downtown crossing of the Lincoln Highway (Illinois 38) and Fourth Street (Illinois 23) is a good place to photograph trains, with favorable sun angles most of the day.  Several photographers (videographers? smart 'phone owners?) set up there for Big Boy's passage on Tuesday.  Stand back, the engineer is blowing the boiler down!

Yes, I am still preparing a video that will feature a few of the moneymakers before and after Extra 4014 East's passage.

STEAM TRAINS CONNECT PEOPLE.

Union Pacific's Big Boy once again demonstrated that proposition on its way across Illinois en route to a rendezvous with brother locomotive 4012 in Scranton and an Independence Day event in Philadelphia.

That WBBM-TV report showed one of several freight trains that were going about their business on Tuesday afernoon.  As has become my custom of late, I'll let others do the train chasing, and pick a comfy spot to watch.  The weather was favorable for hanging out under a tree, and in due time there will be a video forthcoming featuring the freight trains before and after the steamer.

ON THE LIGHTER SIDE.

Yes, a political milestone year can be occasion for Serious Stock Taking.

The fun stuff has its place, even if Excessively Earnest People hold it up for mockery.

“You know damn well that we’re going to be inundated for two years with an attempt to sell a plastic image of America to sell cars and cornflakes,” the activist Jeremy Rifkin, a founder of the People’s Bicentennial Commission, an anti-corporate group, told The New York Times in 1974. “To me that’s treason.”

If this be treason, archivists at Yale University made the most of it.

“History is not just about presidents and kings and diplomats, but a lived daily experience for people,” [curator Joshua] Cochran said. “Looking at this collection, it really reminds you of the everydayness of history.”

The Bicentennial Schlock collection, totaling just over 100 artifacts, is one of Yale’s quirkier holdings. Assembled in 1976 by the historian Jesse Lemisch, it endures as a lively (if a bit grungy) testament to the star-spangled commercialism that swept across the country in the run-up to the 200th anniversary of American independence.

Today, it can be hard to grasp the scale of the swag. By the time the confetti stopped falling, according to one estimate, more than 25,000 items had been produced.

What's quintessentially American about this collection is that the academic historian concurred with Henry Ford on the notion of History being Bunk.

Lemisch, as a lifelong man of the left, was politically sympathetic. But as both a scholar and a self-described “terminal Bicentennial freak,” he also saw an opportunity.

“How many of us,” he wrote in The New Republic in 1976, “are lucky enough to see the central passion of our creative lives translated into the Disney version, and for sale, in this translation, in every supermarket?”

Lemisch, who died in 2018, was not the only one cataloging the goofier manifestations of the Bicentennial. The Gerald R. Ford Presidential Library and Museum in Grand Rapids, Mich., has a trove of memorabilia, including a can of “Bicentennial air.” And the University of Central Florida has a “Bicentennial Junk” collection. But Lemisch’s comes with an intellectual pedigree forged in the history wars of the ’60s and ’70s.

Lemisch, who got his doctorate from Yale in 1963, was part of a generation of social historians who challenged both the conservative bent of scholarship on early America and what they saw as the historical profession’s complacent, complicit relationship with American power.

In his influential 1967 essay “The American Revolution Seen From the Bottom Up,” he argued that the Revolution wasn’t just a top-down affair but also a genuinely democratic uprising driven by the aspirations of the artisan and working classes, which were ultimately thwarted by wealthy elites.

He also pushed for democratization of the archival record. In a 1971 essay called “The American Revolution Bicentennial and the Papers of Great White Men,” Lemisch lamented that the ambitious and well-funded scholarly editing projects undertaken for the anniversary neglected rabble-rousers like Thomas Paine and Sam Adams, to say nothing of women, Black Americans and Native Americans.

Those projects, he argued, reflected the “arrogant nationalism and elitism” of the 1950s that historians, like the nation itself, were already leaving behind.

The schlock collection had its origins in an undergraduate class Lemisch taught at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in the spring of 1976. The course included scholarly reading, but Lemisch also instructed the students to gather as much Bicentennial junk as they could find.

Predictably, the house organ for Radical Chic will spout the Sixties talking points and disregard the damage that subsequent practitioners of radical chic history, most notoriously Howard Zinn, caused.

DISCOVERING THE ELECTRIC PRESERVATION RAILWAYS OF THE STATE LINE.

Mercedes Streeter of The Autopian stumbles upon the East Troy Electric Railroad.

Countless historic American streetcar and interurban lines have disappeared since their heyday, but I found a place where you can still experience a commute like it’s 1920. This is the East Troy Electric Railroad, Wisconsin’s last running interurban railroad, and it’s one of the most tranquil rides you’ll ever take that doesn’t even surpass 15 mph.

The East Troy Electric Railroad is one of my favorite kinds of museums. Nestled in the town of East Troy in southeastern Wisconsin, this museum doesn’t really have the marketing of the Illinois Railway Museum or the federally recognized status of the National Railroad Museum. Instead, it’s a museum that you hear about through word of mouth or stumble upon on social media, and it has the same kind of lovely charm as a mom-and-pop shop. The museum is small enough that, if you’re not paying attention, you could drive right by it and not notice it was there.

We've called attention to the East Troy Electric Railroad numerous times.  It's unusual among preservation railways in that its busiest season is fall, for apple picking and leaf peeping.