Hello, and welcome to my electronic lair. Now get out while you still can:hehe:
I've never been like everybody else. I'll say that up front. I would stare like a deer in the headlights whenever somebody brought up the latest car from ford or dodge or whoever (like I care anyway). I would spend hours putting pencil to paper, drawing steam locomotives and dreaming of sitting in the right-hand seatbox, hauling down the whistle cord as the pounding 2-8-2 under my feet tried valiantly to stay on schedule. I've often found that I'm even an oddball when it comes to train lovers: Most of the people of my age group (with a few notable exceptions: I'm talkin' to you Cappy), when they do like trains, mostly blather on about SD70ACe's, GEVOs, and those blasted Amtrak P42 shovelnosed heathens, which as far as I'm concerned are the ugliest things to lead a passenger consist since EMD's EA unit. To them, a proper train is 90 well cars full of double-stack containers, pulled by three MU'ed SD70ACes with another one running DPU on the rear, and nary a caboose in sight. For me, a proper train is 100 cars of mixed freight, with gons, hoppers, flats, tank cars, boxes and stock cars rocking and rolling behind a smoke-belching beast of a Katy L1 Mikado, a bright yellow cupola caboose with the words "Serves the Southwest Well" emblazoned on its.
I am, and always will be, that weirdo in the back of the engine shop who doesn't talk to anybody, and just keeps fiddling with that Berkshire the railway tucked away after retirement and then proceeded to forget about. It's just that the rest of the people there don't know that I have the engine running.
And that's the beauty of trainz, isn't it? Time is irrelevant, and history doesn't apply. You can run a heavy intermodal train or a big auto-parts hotshot behind modern diesel power one minute and seamlessly hop into the cab of a D&RGW Mudhen the next. You can build a faithful, to-the-rivet model of the Pittsburg Division of the old PRR from Horseshoe curve all the way to Gallatzin just as easily as you can a railroad that sprang from nothing more than your imagination. You can model your favorite railroad in the glory days of its past or you can wind the clock forward and see what it would have looked like if it hadn't been merged out of existance.
And it isn't just trains that can be modelled. thanks to people like Vulcan and Arraial, we have flyable boeing passenger planes and big, fast combat aircraft. you can have a rolling dogfight over central London, maneuver to avoid flak rising up from the blackened streets and rooftops of Berlin, or just go and strafe that annoying neighbor you don't like :hehe: . You can haul Iron ore in the Legendary Edmund Fitzgerald, travel in Victorian Opulence aboard the RMS Mauretania or dive to the bottom of the ocean in a Nuclear submarine (What, you don't believe me? I pray you, have a little look-see at Vulcan's website). Heck, I've even converted several of Coutumariee's warships to drivable models...now i just need to make the cannons work.
I know there's others out there on the forums who are like me, that strange guy who everyone thinks is Horror-Movie crazy and who lurks, like me, around that old Berk in the back of the overhaul backshop. And I say, embrace it. Light the kindling, stoke the rising fire, kick off the air and roll out of that place with pride, whistle howling and bell clanging. Show them all what it really means to be a train-lover.
and if that doesn't work, you can always just run 'em over.
I've never been like everybody else. I'll say that up front. I would stare like a deer in the headlights whenever somebody brought up the latest car from ford or dodge or whoever (like I care anyway). I would spend hours putting pencil to paper, drawing steam locomotives and dreaming of sitting in the right-hand seatbox, hauling down the whistle cord as the pounding 2-8-2 under my feet tried valiantly to stay on schedule. I've often found that I'm even an oddball when it comes to train lovers: Most of the people of my age group (with a few notable exceptions: I'm talkin' to you Cappy), when they do like trains, mostly blather on about SD70ACe's, GEVOs, and those blasted Amtrak P42 shovelnosed heathens, which as far as I'm concerned are the ugliest things to lead a passenger consist since EMD's EA unit. To them, a proper train is 90 well cars full of double-stack containers, pulled by three MU'ed SD70ACes with another one running DPU on the rear, and nary a caboose in sight. For me, a proper train is 100 cars of mixed freight, with gons, hoppers, flats, tank cars, boxes and stock cars rocking and rolling behind a smoke-belching beast of a Katy L1 Mikado, a bright yellow cupola caboose with the words "Serves the Southwest Well" emblazoned on its.
I am, and always will be, that weirdo in the back of the engine shop who doesn't talk to anybody, and just keeps fiddling with that Berkshire the railway tucked away after retirement and then proceeded to forget about. It's just that the rest of the people there don't know that I have the engine running.
And that's the beauty of trainz, isn't it? Time is irrelevant, and history doesn't apply. You can run a heavy intermodal train or a big auto-parts hotshot behind modern diesel power one minute and seamlessly hop into the cab of a D&RGW Mudhen the next. You can build a faithful, to-the-rivet model of the Pittsburg Division of the old PRR from Horseshoe curve all the way to Gallatzin just as easily as you can a railroad that sprang from nothing more than your imagination. You can model your favorite railroad in the glory days of its past or you can wind the clock forward and see what it would have looked like if it hadn't been merged out of existance.
And it isn't just trains that can be modelled. thanks to people like Vulcan and Arraial, we have flyable boeing passenger planes and big, fast combat aircraft. you can have a rolling dogfight over central London, maneuver to avoid flak rising up from the blackened streets and rooftops of Berlin, or just go and strafe that annoying neighbor you don't like :hehe: . You can haul Iron ore in the Legendary Edmund Fitzgerald, travel in Victorian Opulence aboard the RMS Mauretania or dive to the bottom of the ocean in a Nuclear submarine (What, you don't believe me? I pray you, have a little look-see at Vulcan's website). Heck, I've even converted several of Coutumariee's warships to drivable models...now i just need to make the cannons work.
I know there's others out there on the forums who are like me, that strange guy who everyone thinks is Horror-Movie crazy and who lurks, like me, around that old Berk in the back of the overhaul backshop. And I say, embrace it. Light the kindling, stoke the rising fire, kick off the air and roll out of that place with pride, whistle howling and bell clanging. Show them all what it really means to be a train-lover.
and if that doesn't work, you can always just run 'em over.