MODEL RAILROADING IS FUN. I've been hacking on the rail-road/All the live-long night.

Model railways may not be the apotheosis of cool, but some may disagree. Alan Cox, Linux kernel hacker, likes to use his hacking skills to repair N scale locomotives just for fun. Bruce Springsteen and Donald Sutherland are fans of miniature trains, and more surprisingly, the erstwhile Godfather of Grunge, Neil Young, holds US Patent 20050110653 in a digital command and control system for model railroads.

"It's meditation for me", he has said. "It's such a relief to escape music making and the pressure of music, to release it all in algorithms and theory of operations."

I know this story has made the rounds of the model railroad discussion lists previously. The Superintendent deems it of sufficiently general interest relay it.