WATCH THIS SPACE.

It has been over three years since we featured an "On My Workbench" post, and one could easily see in that post that the workbench was, to put it charitably, cluttered.  The most recent "Watch This Space" post featured the addition of staging tracks in a central peninsula.

Inside that peninsula is space for a workshop.  Once the March Meet wrapped up, that space started getting organized.

All the workbenches and machine stands are in one place, and the clutter on the bench tops is being sorted through, discarded, or put in a proper place, and there might be some progress reports of actual work on those actual workbenches in the near future.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Yes, there's a lot going on in the wider world, but I've been having too much fun to let that get to me.  Maybe next month.

With our Hallowe'en looking more like the White Christmas we probably won't get (based on past experience) there has been plenty of time for improving the infrastructure, in between the rare dry sunny days where yard work is in order.

I call the layout "Gloucester Branch" and maybe it's far enough along now to start putting that level of track in.

The house might have been custom-built with a model railroad in mind, and yet, keeping the sections I want to be level level requires a bit of attention.  This segment, along the west wall, will be the location of Manchester-By-the-Sea, a real town on the real Gloucester Branch, complete with a small harbor and lobster boats.  Here, the harbor entrance, which, if all goes well, will feature a working bascule bridge, will be set up between the two uprights at center.  I have to install the Tortoise switch machines and ballast the track in staging, where you see the tracks, first.

I'm providing here for two levels of track, on the lower level there will be additional, primarily passenger train, staging occupying the space in the center of the cellar, while the Gloucester Branch will continue to rise through Magnolia and onward to West Gloucester.  The branch has to keep climbing to reach Rockport, which is the middle level of benchwork near the stepladder in the background.  I've learned a thing or two about how to build for more than one level of track at once.  Keep watching.

We're looking at the narrowest part of the layout, which is a walk-around plan.  The lead to lower staging and the Gloucester Branch will curve around the support column at left, then the aisle gets wider out of view beyond.  I'm planning to install a lighthouse and some kind of delayed motion detector to sound a foghorn if anybody stands too long in the narrows.

The next track to be installed will be here, which is the double-track Saugus Branch through Lynn Common to West Lynn.  If you have a railroad atlas, you'll know that this is loosely based on the real thing, with perhaps a longer industrial lead at Lynn Common.  On the real thing, there's a perfect spur track off a curve, which would go well into a corner in a smaller scale.  In O Scale, you have to pay attention to the ability of operators to reach.

For now, people arriving at the base of the stairs can still get around most of the basement.  That is going to change.

Eventually, there will be two sets of tracks separated by a view block in here.  To the left will be the station at Salem (note the witch.)  To the right, on the opposite side of the view block, will be the Hood Milk plant and an oil tank dock that are in Lynn.  In the distance is the Gloucester Branch, climbing up through Beverly Shores (yes, that's modeller's license, I have my reason) and leveling out at Manchester before continuing to rise through Magnolia toward West Gloucester, out of view to the right.

Now to get enough of this presentable between now and the March Meet.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

It's easier to complete most of the scenery on a stretch of model railroad that will be harder to reach after other parts of the layout start taking shape.  Such is the case where the entrance of the Eastern Route Main Line ducks under the Gloucester Branch on its way into staging.

First, the falsework to support the plaster cloth along the wall, and the beginnings of a retaining wall at left.  If I've done this correctly, the ditching I'm providing for will channel the water if something bad happens.  The Gloucester Branch will make an S curve (it's the same way of gaining space you see on the Chicago Loop) in the foreground.

A few days later, there's more of the retaining wall in place (more sections to finish this, using Chooch peel-and-stick components, are on order) and the support for the plaster cloth is finished.  It's thinking time, do I tackle this right now, or work from the top down, on the theory that some of the mess from above might be more easily tidied up with a less finished section here?  Stay tuned.

THE DEFENSIVE COORDINATOR IS NOT NECESSARILY THE SCAPEGOAT.

The Tampa Bay Buccaneers sailed into Green Bay and earned a trip to the 55th Super Bowl.  Because Tampa scored an end-of-first-half touchdown on an obvious Hail Mary situation, current Packer defensive coordinator Mike Pettine might face that clean-out-your-office moment.

The Packers have appeared in the playoffs more times than not in the 21st century, and previous defensive coordinators have paid the price.  In January, 2004, Philadelphia notoriously completed a pass on fourth down with 26 yards to go, to set up a game-tying field goal.  Five days later, then head coach Mike Sherman fired his defensive coordinator, Ed Donatell.  Packer publicist Mike Spofford, in this morning's Insider Inbox, however, makes a relevant observation.

[Quarterback Aaron] Rodgers' legacy is not yet established, so it's not fair to make grand claims. There was so much about the other three championship losses that had nothing to do with him. The opportunities he had with the ball in his hands down the stretch this time might make this one the hardest for him to take, personally. But I'll also say that for only three of 10 playoff appearances (and none of the last five) to be one-and-done is worth a lot. And two of those three quick exits were last-play-of-the-game, walk-off defeats. You're right about [previous quarterback Brett] Favre, whose overall postseason play wasn't as good as Rodgers'.

In particular, that Philadelphia game was an overtime loss. The Packers won the toss, took the ball, and then-quarterback Brett Favre went for it all on first down. Sometimes, that works, and sometimes, he gets intercepted. That's how the fourth-and-26 game ended, with an Eagle field goal after the interception, and the January 2008 conference championship game turned out the same way, with the Giants getting the late field goal for the tie, and the field goal after the interception.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Yes, I'm still paying attention to the investigation of Amtrak 188's crash.

There's infrastructure work of a more cheerful kind to report.

Cold Spring Shops headquarters is a train room concealed under a ranch house.  There's an all-season sunroom with a western exposure and a crawl space underneath.  That space is not suited to running trains, but it's now insulated against the frozen ground that seems to be plaguing us from November into April.

With that done, work continues installing the drop ceiling and preparing to install tracks into the southwest corner of the house.

Work on the railroad began with the uppermost track at right; with the ceiling in place and bracing installed in front of the crawl space, those tracks will continue into that corner.

On the northeast corner, I'm working on a believable representation of Cockwood Harbour, just down the Exe River from Starcross.

But do I model the harbour with the tide out and the boats careened?

Or is it more eye-catching with the tide in?

Suggestions?

A SELF-FISKING.

Jerry "Why Evolution is True" Coyne finds a terminally silly jargon-laden pedagogy paper, and a more efficient way of fisking it.  "I’m rejecting both ways today in favor of The Third Way: let the paper reveal its own ideology, postmodern craziness, and authoritarianism by just giving quotes."

The abstract itself gets off to a good start.  "This article presents an argument on the importance of teaching science with a feminist framework and defines it by acknowledging that all knowledge is historically situated and is influenced by social power and politics."  Knowledge has to be "historically situated" in the sense that all learning is cumulative, and builds on that which is established previously; the role of knowledge in creating or distorting social power and politics suggests there is not a single direction of causation.  That "feminist framework," however, suggests a tight prior trammelling inquiry:  "We present this work as an example of a transformative pedagogical model to dismantle White supremacy in Chemistry."  I wonder what the reaction of the authors would be to "What evidence would motivate you to revise your priors?"  It probably would not be reasoned.  Check out the Testament of Faith that follows.

When scientifically established facts, such as the nonbinary nature of both sex and gender are seen by students of science as a belief, one might ask: Are we being true to scientific knowledge? We use this student comment as a reflection of the subjectivity of how the pedagogical decisions are made in teaching “true science” vs what existing scientific knowledge tells us. This has resulted in the propagation of scientific miseducation for generations.

Two-four-six-eight, time to trans-substantiate.  Also time for the economics faculty at East [North] Carolina to time-slip the chemistry department.

In this article we describe the development, implementation, and student experience from a special topic course in chemistry, Science and Feminism, as a disruptive tool to challenge the status quo in Chemistry. Using Critical Race Theory and intersectional feminism as the framework, this course aimed at creating an intellectual as well as physical space for STEM students at East Carolina University (ECU) where they could explore their identities and how these intersect with the knowledge base and the pedagogy of science by looking at these from historical, political, and feminist lens. The other aim was to shine light, through this process, how scientific epistemology and culture have strong links with capitalism, enslavement, colonization, and exploitation of female-bodied folks. We provide the historical context of teaching this class in our institution, development of the course syllabus, assignments, and evaluations adopted for this course over the past two years as a template for future course development.

Go to Why Evolution is True for the rest, which is a convex combination of the mock-with-glee and fisk-each-line approach to online commentary.  Apparently in the Church of Intersectionality the "historical context" can be carried off without much knowledge of the history of political economy.  But call the project "disruptive" and that might be truth in packaging, although not in the good connotation of the word.  Additionally, it's possible to pass the course with no knowledge of mathematics.  That is, unless somebody is running another Sokal hoax.

Unit 3 explored the development and interrelationship between quantum mechanics, Marxist materialism, Afro-futurism/pessimism, and postcolonial nationalism. To problematize time as a linear social construct, the Copenhagen interpretation of the collapse of wave-particle duality was utilized. The end of the unit assignments was writing a reflection from all the readings and participation in a debate with the topic: past is never dead, it is not even past. The students also had the option of watching the 2020 movie, Antebellum. However, the instructor was flexible on this assignment as some of the African American students did not want to watch it and be triggered. They wrote a reflection on a book on race and gender that they had read.

"Flexible" is the new underwater basketweaving.

The paper concludes, predictably, more like an Order of Worship than a scientific paper, with a confession of sins, namely, the oh-so-popular land acknowledgement.

Perhaps I should append one to future posts:  Cold Spring Shops headquarters is on land that was in Wisconsin Territory before Illinois became a state.  We recognize the labor applied by those settlers marking the trails that contemporary Illinoisans use to visit Lake Geneva, the Dells, and Door County, and to watch their teams get owned in Green Bay.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Winter is a good season for working on the model railroad.  That's also true of the other seasons; winter, though, is when most of the swap meets take place, the layout tours go on the schedule, the new stuff has to be tuned and put into operation.

So it is with the State of Maine Northern.  There's an industrial complex a-building that features an Open Hearth steel works on the outward side of the tracks, with the General Electric River Works on the inward side.  The tracks through that complex are now in place.  From the aisle back are the Melt Shop tracks, the Material Yard tracks for the Open Hearth, the Outward Exchange Siding, the Outward and Inward Main Line tracks, the Inward Exchange Siding, and the River Works track.  There's enough switching to be done in this relatively small space to keep one occupied for several hours, more so if the full schedule of passenger trains is running.

Consider this video a preview of coming attractions for the upcoming March O Scale Meet.

There might be more new features on offer by the time that swap meet comes around. Stay tuned.

IF YOU CAN'T BE FREQUENT, AT LEAST BE DEPENDABLE.

It has long been a Cold Spring Shops position that Passenger Rail operations be frequent, that trains make dependable connections with each other, and that the value is in the intermediate stops.

Let me offer, dear reader, a meditation on these themes inspired by the first leg of a recent trip.  There is a dependable Regional Rail connection that gets to within twenty miles of DeKalb.

That's a seven-car formation from Chicago that will form the 2.18 departure of Train 52 for Chicago.  There's no snow on the ground, but it's still chilly, and additional snow storms are on offer for the upper Midwest.  Below is the view out the back door on the morning of April 9, just before this adventure began.

We arrive Chicago as the evening rush is taking shape.  The Metropolitan Lounge is filling, as sleeper passengers from the arriving trains await the boarding call for their onward trains.  All the trains from the west are on time or close enough to time that Amtrak will not be providing lodging and arranging replacement space tonight.  There's now a vendor selling canned beer to complement the bag snacks and pop currently available gratis.  Buy a Blue Ribbon.

I'm holding space on Thirty, and understandably apprehensive about the tender mercies of Norfolk Southern across Indiana and Ohio.  Get to talking with a couple enroute somewhere in West Virginia on Fifty.  (You don't want a cross-country connection involving the tri-weekly Cardinal to blow up.)  Buy a round of Blue Ribbons.  They're called before Thirty is.

Amtrak 30 Capitol Limited, Chicago to Washington, D.C., 10-11 April 2018.

Genesis diesels 156 (in Rudolph paint scheme), 52
New baggage car 61060
Transition sleeper 39015, Superliner sleepers 32002, 32075, Cross Country Cafe car 37016, Sightseer lounge 33044, Superliner coaches 31008, 34096, 34084.

Leave Chicago 6.39 (by my watch, not synchronized with standard clock: with gates closed five minutes before scheduled departure, hold 7.30 reservation for dinner.

Here, a note on dependability.  Company at table includes two women of Fort Wayne who had made a day trip into Chicago to buy merchandise for a store one of them owns.  Neither had ridden a train before, both were enjoying the outing.  (Once upon a time, they would have had The Pennsylvania Railroad direct to Fort Wayne, and perhaps in the future they will have a corridor service linking Columbus with Chicago.)  They had opportunity for a sit-down meal, and the wait staff were properly attentive that there were passengers on a short schedule aboard.

But for how much longer?  The latest attempt by Amtrak to emulate the airlines might be the elimination of dining service on the Capitol (once home to the salad bowl and Deer Park spring water of Baltimore and Ohio) and Lake Shore (must we really mention the watermelon pickle of the old Twentieth Century?)  I'm not making this up.  Quoting Jim "Travel and Trains" Loomis, "I come across a press release from Amtrak announcing that there will be no more hot food for sleeping car passengers on the Capitol Limited and the Lake Shore limited.

"Instead, those of us riding in and paying top dollar for sleeping car accommodations will be able to order meals being prepared off site somewhere and delivered to our roomettes or bedrooms."

Did I mention the two women were riding coach?  If they have to schlep their own food aboard, they might as well be riding the bus.  Meanwhile, on the sleepers, will the food delivery be when the train passes a given location, no matter what time it is, and will it be tied to a train-order hoop the way the freight crews sometimes get fed?

The good news is, I didn't know this at the time I boarded, and perhaps buying a round of Pabsts satisfied the gods of the high iron.  South Bend 9.14 - 9.19; Elkhart 9.40 - 9.43; Waterloo 10.33 - 10.34 for the front end, 10.35 - 10.41 for the coaches.  Sack time, without the stress of sitting waiting for signals to clear.  Observe Toledo, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh without bothering to check times: that dark hour connection for Altoona, Harrisburg, and Philadelphia holds, but no through service linking Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, and Chicago annoys.

Next morning, decide to rejoin the world somewhere around Connellsville, somewhere around 7.30, on Baltimore and Ohio rails.  Cumberland two stops, 9.50 - 9.54 and 9.56 - 10.10; service stop east of town, Martinsburg 11.51 - 11.58; Harpers Ferry 12.20 - 12.22; Rockville two stops, 1.10 - 1.11 and 1.12 - 1.13; arrive Washington Union Station at 1.36.

Upstairs, into the station, there's a massive queue awaiting the 2.0 departure of a regional train that originates in Newport News and must use the southern tracks.  That's the downside of the food court and retail space being placed in the concourse area of Union Station, where the train gates, baggage claim, baggage checking, and the Club Acela lounge also are.  The queue stretches almost the full extent of the concourse.

That view dates to a previous visit, on 20 October 2014.  The space at far right of the photo is for passenger services and the departure lounges.

The old waiting room area, by contrast, is a great empty space.

In Chicago, Amtrak cope with the large passenger loadings and cramped space by using the Great Hall as ... imagine this ... a waiting room with benches, and passengers are escorted to their trains directly from there.  But perhaps that is a good problem to have, more passengers waiting to get on a train than there is space for them to wait, and at least for the present, they don't have to report an hour early for screening and check-in and all the rest, and on those high platforms, there are plenty of doors through which to board.

I may have to make a habit of buying a round for travelling acquaintances.  But dog-gone it, Amtrak, stop messing with the food service and degrading the first class.

IS THE NARRATIVE BEGINNING TO SHIFT?

I watch the Sunday shows, despite sometimes regretting turning them off, or tuning in Mass for Shut-Ins instead.  On occasion, my tenacity is rewarded.  Consider the way last Sunday's Meet the Press took shape.  The first guest, after the predictable establishmentarian fluffing, was Dr. Tom Inglesby, director of the Center for Health Security of the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.  The interesting bits came late in the conversation.

CHUCK TODD: What do you tell -- we've gotten quite a few emails from viewers who say -- and I've had plenty of conversations with folks who say, "Hey, you know what, our area's just fine. And I don't understand why all these lockdowns -- and boy, they did all these lockdowns in that state. And our state's the same way without all the lockdowns. Were they really all necessary?" What do you say to that viewer who they look in their own neighborhood essentially and think, "I just don't see it."

DR. TOM INGLESBY: Yeah. Well, I think lockdowns were necessary. They actually have changed the course of the epidemic in the United States. We have the largest epidemic in the world. Five times as many cases as any other country in the world. And you can see over time that the curve is moving in the right direction. And it is now appropriate for states to be thinking about how to very carefully reopen and do it as safely as possible. But, yes, I think we needed to get control of this epidemic in the country. And now reset. And now places where there is very little disease, those are the places where it's going to be safest to gradually reopen.

CHUCK TODD: Give us a sense of what you think the next three months are going to look like with this virus. We keep talking about what the fall might look like. But given what we've seen -- what you've studied around the world in various climates, what do you -- and seeing what our reopening status is essentially going to be. Right? Where it looks like about half the country is going to stick with some, some social distancing guidelines. What do you expect the summer to look like?

DR. TOM INGLESBY: Well, it's difficult to predict. The future really is in our hands. It depends on how people in individual states react to the situation. If people continue to be very careful about physical distancing, wearing cloth masks when outside, avoiding gatherings, I think -- I'm hopeful that states will be able to control their outbreaks. We also need to have very strong contact tracing efforts around the country. That's what countries around the world have used with a lot of success. So if you get a case, you investigate it quickly, you make sure all those contacts are safely quarantined. And we keep control that way. I think -- we shouldn't think of this as kind of starting and stopping and this is over. This is a longer-term --

CHUCK TODD: Right.

DR.TOM INGLESBY: -- process. And we're all in it together. And our actions are going to matter. I think, you know, the models in this country, the leading models predict that there may be as many as 110,000 people who have died by this disease a month from now. Those are models. It's possible for us to do better than models. It's also possible for us to do worse depending on what people decide to do, their own actions.

CHUCK TODD: What do you say -- what do you take away from a situation in Georgia where they were one of the first states to try to reopen. There was a lot of doom and gloom predictions. And so far things have gone okay.

DR. TOM INGLESBY: Yeah, Georgia has been about the same as it was before the lockdown ended. My understanding is that many people in Georgia are cautiously and carefully moving back towards reopening. So I don't think people should see the reopening process in Georgia as everything happened at once and everything restarted in the same way. It seems like there's a lot of caution by individuals around the state. But that being said, it does -- it's a good beginning in the fact that it hasn't gotten worse. It does take time for us to see the change that might occur following changes in policy because it takes a while for people to become sick after getting infected. And it could take even longer for them to be hospitalized. So I think it's too soon for us to say in any state how things are going. We need to see a couple more weeks.

CHUCK TODD: Alright.

DR. TOM INGLESBY: But it's good news that things have not gone in the wrong direction.

That's a conversation in which a public health official concedes lessons learned, which is what doing science is about.  Politicians are another matter, but that's material for a different sort of post with a different sort of audience (public administration and administrative law types, primarily) in mind.

For now, take away "It is possible to do better than models."  For my economics readers, there's probably an epidemiological equivalent of the Lucas Critique, namely, that agents will revise their behavior in response to the policies that treat agent responses as predictable, at work.  Also take away, "things have not gone in the wrong direction."

That conversation could have been the sort of thing by which the old Establishment Consensus got to its policy: reasoned discussion, then the panel chews it over, and the staff-level bureaucrats who are watching get to work drafting things.

But what came next was even more unusual.  Peter Navarro is currently the closest thing to a procurement czar in the Trump administration, and, predictably for Meet the Press, some of that conversation turned to more ways in which Somebody in Charge invoked the Defense Production Act (or was it burned some incense and said a few Hail Marys) more broadly.  However, at no time did the moderator get into his truculent chipmunk mode, this despite having ample opportunities.  That despite the conversation taking a turn that might have been, well, triggering.

CHUCK TODD: I want to ask you quickly about the [Centers for Disease Control] and ask you whether the president has confidence in the CDC. It does seem as if the initial guidelines, they didn't want them put out. They put down very limited guidelines with more detailed ones coming later. CDC hasn't been able to give a briefing now in over a month. Does the president have confidence in the CDC as our lead, as our lead on this pandemic?

PETER NAVARRO: Well, I'd say two things about that. First of all, you should ask the president that question, not me. But early on in this crisis, the CDC which really had the most trusted brand around the world in this space, really let the country down with the testing. Because not only did they keep the testing within the bureaucracy, they had a bad test. And that did set us back. But going forward with these guidelines, the important thing to understand here for the American people is this, opening up this economy is not a question of lives versus jobs. The fact of the matter is and what President Trump realized early on is that if you lock people down, you may save lives directly from the “China Virus”. But you indirectly, you're going to kill a lot more people. And why do I say that? We know statistically based on our experience with the China trade shock in the 2000s that unemployment creates more suicides, depression and drug abuse. But we also know this in this crisis, as we've basically locked down our hospitals for everything but COVID, women haven't been getting mammograms or cervical examinations for cancer. We haven't been able to do other procedures for the heart or the kidneys. And that's going to kill people as well. So if you contrast like this complete lock down where some of the people in the medical community want to just run and hide until the virus is extinguished, that's going to not only take a huge toll on the American economy it's going to kill many more people than the virus, the “China Virus” ever would.

CHUCK TODD: I've got to ask you this question about the president. On one hand he says he wants to leave these decisions up to governors. But it does seem as if -- if he doesn't like the decision of a governor, particularly if they're in the Midwest, he expresses his view. How does that help the governor be able to make their own decisions?

PETER NAVARRO: Look, I report directly to the president. I'm one of the top five advisors on policy. I let the president speak for himself. That's all I can say. I do think that what we're seeing here across this country in terms of different responses, that it is very useful to leverage local control. But on the other hand, I'm a Californian. And when I see the mayor of Los Angeles want to lock down that city through the end of July, I've just got to have to scratch my head. I think that California -- that's the only way I see California ever becoming a red state. Because my folks back in Orange County are not going to put up with that kind of nonsense. And it is nonsense.

Now, perhaps all that provocation went out because Mr Todd is also minding his manners. A month or two ago he disclosed that the producers were wise to provocateurs, particularly of the Republican variety, hoping to be invited on in order to get into a confrontation that would later go viral on the likes of News Busters and Twitchy, and he might have passed on the bait (government failure with those CDC tests, China virus, lockdown nonsense) so as to deprive the populists of their clickbait.  OK, fine, and yet the messages (Washington expertise sometimes isn't, deaths of despair might accompany quarantine, China is a ten-meter country, and overweening governors are wrecking their states) got out on establishment television.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Years ago, Matt "Dean Dad" Reed teased me about all the model railroad stuff he had to wade through to go with the contrarian perspective I was providing him on higher education.  I noted that the best was yet to come.

Now he's asking a question of readers. "Wise and worldly readers who have retired, to the extent that you’re comfortable answering the question, how did you know when it was time?"

Simple.

The legislature has not chosen to fund the universities adequately, nor has it corrected the ham-handed pension reform that has driven about one-fifth of the faculty and staff, along with the institutional memory carried therein, into retirement.

The university has not chosen to properly staff the academic departments, nor has it recognized that making increased demands on the fewer remaining faculty in the absence of any merit money is unlikely to yield enthusiastic participation on committees or a harvest of high-quality publications.

And the subtle denigration of mainstream white guys as less desirable hires or as majors continues.

But I no longer have the opportunity in meetings or other forums to argue against those follies.

Nor need I be complicit in them any longer.

His column has elicited a variety of responses, some along lines I offered, some different.  As one of the commenters noted, "you don't leave a role for no role."

They left because they had other things they wanted to do, while they were still physically capable of doing them. One of my favorite people, back at CCM, told me that she knew it was time to go when she couldn’t bring herself to put quite as much into grading papers as she used to. She believed that the students deserved excellent feedback, and she could feel hers starting to slip. By my lights, she was still a star, but she was more interested in having an interesting and adventurous retirement than in becoming a steadily less effective teacher. I admired that.

Sometimes, what students understand as proper feedback differs from what the professor believes it is. But I digress.

A TAVERN IS A WATCH PARTY WITH A COVER CHARGE.

In the wake of last Friday's watch party turned gang fight, Milwaukee's government and the Bucks are working on providing a safer space for casual fans to hang out.  There will be plenty of time to work out the arrangements, with the Bucks excused on Sunday.

Milwaukee Police Chief Jeffrey Norman said he would support a downtown security boundary to curb violence, according to our partners at the Milwaukee Business Journal.

"(I'm) supportive of something of that nature, but that's beyond my wheelhouse," Norman told the Business Journal. "I know that (idea) was floating around last year. I believe that may be floating around again this year."

Should something like that be implemented in the city of Milwaukee, it would be up to city agencies and elected officials to draw the boundaries and establish rules for the area.

Norman told the Milwaukee Business Journal that he would also "absolutely" support metal detectors being placed at the entrance to a possible security perimeter to detect concealed firearms and help with the flow of traffic into the secured area.

If you have bouncers, and possibly metal detectors, all that distinguishes your public watching area from a tavern might be the cover charge.  With security theater becoming common at street festivals, adding a cover charge to the security theater might not be a big deal.  "According to the Business Journal, other cities have instituted security admission fees for popular entertainment districts to help pay for additional security. But doing something like that in Milwaukee would require collaboration, Norman said."  In Milwaukee, the Bucks appear to be in accord.

"I think for us, (it's) very important to have a secure perimeter, you know? What does that mean and where does it extend it? We obviously kind of take Deer District proper as our land, but the theory would be how would you not extend that beyond the Deer District and really look at the whole entertainment district, as a way to create a perimeter," [Bucks president Peter Feigin] said.

WISN 12 asked the mayor's office about the possibility of expanding the secure perimeter into the entertainment district.

A spokesman said the mayor is interested in exploring every viable option and this is on the table.

Somewhere, though, the public safety creates opportunities for rent-seeking.

Some bar and restaurant owners in downtown Milwaukee say they want the Milwaukee Bucks franchise to be held more accountable for the violence that broke out Friday night in which 21 people were shot.

“I feel like we’re just left with whatever the Bucks want to do,” Old German Beer Hall owner Hans Weissberger tells Wisconsin’s Morning News. “I don’t feel involved in it (what goes on there), we see the schedule, we see what’s going to be happening there.”

“The Bucks have largely washed their hands of this thing by saying this didn’t happen in the Deer District, it happened around the Deer District,” he added. “That’s not the standard that we as bar owners are held to. If something happens in our neighborhood we are blamed for it even if we keep those people outside of our bar.”

Yes, and if the Bucks and the city stop collaborating on setting up outdoor really-big-screen televisions there will be more people looking for conventionally-big-screen televisions in the bars.

But wait, dear reader, there are even more rents to be sought.  The city's new protocols restrict food trucks on the streets around the arena complex.  There has long been a battle between people operating brick-and-mortar bars and restaurants and food truck operators.  Why not use "security" as a way to change the correlation of forces?

The City also announced plans to relocate food trucks that park along Water Street and Old World 3rd in an effort to cut down on loitering. Weissberger says loitering has only recently become an issue.

“The loitering issue on Old World 3rd Street has generally only been a major issue during these watch parties,” Weissberger said. “By having a free event that then has a limited occupancy at some point you’re giving people a license to loiter.”

He offered a few suggestions as to how he thinks the violence issues in Milwaukee can be, at least partially, solved. Weissberger says he would like the Bucks to tack on an attendance fee or mandate some time of registration for attendees at playoff watch parties.

That is, make the watch party have a cover charge, same as the bars?

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The fall weather is upon us, right on time, and that should make for opportunities to work on the railroad.

During the summer, the cellar is a refuge from the heat on the hot and humid days.  It looked like we were going to have a lot of those early on, although most of August and September were near or a little below recorded normal temperatures, making for a lot of outside time.

What's the point of putting a train room under the garage, if the train room doesn't get built under the garage?

There was a lot of work with the hammer drill making holes in the concrete walls, then driving concrete anchors to hold the furring strips and the insulation.  The test of this insulation will come this winter.

After a lot of discussion with other model railroaders, the train room will have this painted ceiling (it's the underside of the garage) and those big garage-style lights will be replaced with strings of light-emitting-diode spotlights above the tracks.

The paint booth will be behind the tracks and hidden away, once all the work is done.There's a blower in the paint booth, and the ducting has subsequently been connected and aligned to vent to the outside.

In the main basement, the photo backdrop that's along a particularly narrow stretch of the upper benchwork ends abruptly.  I never studied impressionist landscape painting, which might have come in handy here, where the hardboard backdrop wants to give the impression of the tree line continuing.

Put enough three dimensional trees in front of the backdrop, though, and the transition will be a lot less jarring.

The March Meet will be St. Patrick's weekend, the way it used to be.  Let's see what gets done in the next six months.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

It has been over a year since we last viewed any heavy construction on the Gloucester Branch, and the clutter of building had to be tidied up in time for the March Meet that might have been the last social gathering of model railroaders for who knows how many multiples of fifteen days will pass until the authorities decide to let us out of house arrest.

There's a fresh bundle of lumber down cellar, as well as detailing supplies to bring some of the layout to a scenicked state.  Let's start topside, in the town of Zudnokhovsk.  We've come a long way from laying out a grid of screen wire over a wooden frame covered with papier-mache.  (It's now possible to buy pre-mixed papier-mache, just add water and slap it in place, as well as plaster-infused cloth of the sort once associated with broken limbs.  We'll turn to those things in the future.)

That's 1" insulating foam.  It doesn't matter what color it is, because it will be covered over with one or another sort of ground cover or structures.  Those Norfolk Southern gons are a long way from home, but just parked out of the way for now.  Anybody have any leads on Stalin-era antiaircraft guns in O Scale?  A bridge that large would have its own defensive detail posted.

Part of the craft of building a layout on several levels is getting those sections of track that will subsequently be hard to get at to a more-or-less finished state before they get covered over by track, let alone track and ground cover above.  In the distance you see the two tracks of the Eastern Route Main Line converging into a lead for staging that represents Ipswich and points north.  The dasher boards are in place along the tracks (there's nothing quite so annoying as something derailing and then going to the floor) and the ballast is in place and dressed so that wheels don't trip over a rock somewhere.  I'm hoping the Tortoise powering the switch will stay reliable, maybe a little more testing before the upper works continues.  The Gloucester Branch carries out a reverse curve here in order to vault over the staging lead and turn the corner at the southwest side of the train room.

Looking the other way, here is the ramp to the throat of the staging yard.  That, too, will require some dressing up before Manchester-by-the-Sea takes shape above.  As long as there's no place to go, watch the show, watch the show, watch the show.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Swap meet season continues, with the big Chicago area O Scale show scheduled for Lombard, March 20-23.  The Gloucester Branch offers an open day as part of the layout tours, and this year's feature will be locomotives with onboard power, dead rail if you will.

The power in the video began as a Lionel "Train Master."  A previous owner converted it to two-rail operation, fitting it with a Central Locomotive Works drive and an ingenious reuse of the Lionel side frames, and an open-frame permanent magnet motor.

The motor mount is exactly the right size for a can motor taken out of an Atlas F unit from the 1970s, and there's plenty of space for a Ring Engineering onboard power module and the battery, and a speaker for sound.  Sounds and lights are yet to be installed.  The drive train is in good order.  Enjoy.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

It's been a productive winter building the State of Maine Northern.  There's enough track in place that it's now possible to model the New Haven delivering interchange cars.

The track where the State of Maine Northern leaves cars for interchange to the New Haven will occupy space in the background.

In addition, the steel mill trackage on the lower level is in place (the high line to the blast furnace is quite a project) and for Open Days during the March Meet visitors were able to switch out the steel mill.

There has to be an idler car between the locomotive and any bottle car.  The outward New Haven interchange train is in the background.  I still have plans to include smoke in those smokestacks.

Once the March Meet ended, construction resumed.

Left to right: the High Car route (a way for trains to get from staging to the north side of Salem, Mass.); the inward and outward tracks of the Saugus Branch, here tacked down as the glue sets up; the inward and outward tracks of the Eastern Route Main Line of the State of Maine Northern; the interchange tracks between Midvale Maritime Steel and the State of Maine Northern.

Speaking of Midvale Steel, an improvised large tank car for transporting coal tar.

That's just after I finished lettering it.  Work tables are sometimes cluttered.

Recently, O Scale Resource visited the railroad.  Their write-up is in the March-April 2019 issue.  This link might get you directly to the write-up.  Enjoy.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The six months of outdoor season have passed.  Between the Chicago Black Hawks making a Stanley Cup run, and a little self-discipline, there's still progress to report on the railroad.

Some of last model railroad season's work involved site preparation, here insulating a crawl space that will be behind the railroad.

Once that's done, the next framing for the staging yard takes shape.

Then comes the sub-roadbed.  This goes faster when it's a sheet of 3/4" plywood rather than spline.

Next, some tracks, and a few train cars to check the alignment.  And some exercise, scrabbling below all to install wires.

Yes, there will be another level above, connecting to the section at the top of the picture.

Meanwhile, the spline continues to the east, here in the northeast corner of the room.

In the rear, there is a track in place (I work on the difficult sections first), then the roadbed for two tracks of the branch line, and a high line for the blast furnace, then two tracks of the main line, and three tracks for the steel mill.

With winter coming, the only outdoor chore to get in the way is the snow shovelling, which may be real soon.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Sometimes, working on the railroad involves long stretches of new track, or large chunks of benchwork and sub-roadbed.

That's all to make possible the detail work, which means building a custom turnout to fit a space where the out-of-the-box hardware won't go.

Get the stock rail for the main route in place, but not spiked fully, locate the frog (this took some trial and error here, but I can get away with a Number Eight on a ten-foot radius curve), now I've tied the other rail on the main route to the frog, and I'm laying out the diverging route.

A few more of these in, and we'll be seeing some trains running continuously.  The absence of the Packers from the playoffs means more model railroading opportunities.

A CORRIDOR, IF THEY'D DEVELOP IT.

We continue our excursion from Washington to points south.  With the Capitol Limited getting into Washington reasonably close to time, a same-day connection to any of the southern trains is possible.  But given the stakes on this trip, I did not want to gamble with a blown connection in Washington followed by a delayed arrival in Florida.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

Facebook reminded me this morning about the state of the railroad, five years ago.

Progress as of 17 January, 2012.  Furring strips in, wall insulation going in, extra lighting in, no grid yet for the drop ceiling.

Much of the work over the next four years was to build from the northwest corner to the east and to the south.  By 12 January, 2016, the benchwork for staging and the trackage down to staging and up to the Gloucester Branch was in place, and spline for the upper level was going in through western Russian town of Zudnokhovsk.

Main line, station siding, and spur to corrective labor camp in place at Zudnokhovsk now.  Stalin never had beer delivery like this!  Passenger train headed off the Eastern Route Main Line into staging for Ipswich, Portsmouth, and points north.

WATCH THIS SPACE.

The peak model railroad show season is past for this spring, although model railroad construction season never ends and there's always a swap meet somewhere.

For this year's showing of the Gloucester Branch the recently-configured locomotives with onboard power and radio control did most of the work.  They'll go through their paces for you to close April out.

The steam locomotive might be eighty years old; it has a 21st century motor in it, and the battery and control module are in the tender.  The road-switcher is an extensively reworked Lionel "Train Master" that is more accurate as an H16-66.  The cab unit is from an Atlas starter set of the early 1970s that I bought with some food service job money and brought home on my bicycle.  It has new trucks, a new drive train, and a beefier motor.  The booster is the battery car, just like the big railroads are experimenting with.  As these units go through their paces you might see some of the Atlas mill gondolas of that era that have been going through upgrades.  You'll also see a few of the cars lettered for model railroads.