Tolga's Railroad Repository

Nathan Sawaya's "Art of the Brick" will be returning to South Florida this June, and so will the biannual contest that supplements it. I have been a previous winner of the Brick Creation Challenge in 2008 , and am delighted to see this contest return, but stumbled upon this rather offensive and new  rule: "All creations must be glued together and completely secured with no loose parts. Each entry must be submitted on a clean and stable base of plywood, metal, etc. The Center will not be responsible for pieces which become disassembled in any way. No exceptions to these conditions will be accepted." Suffice to say, they lost me as an entrant. While there is some understanding that kids will have some temptation to destroy MOCs, as they sideswiped my 18 wheeler big rig (which is one of the few models from that entry which are still in one piece), the fundamental rule of LEGO is... YOU NEVER GLUE LEGO. That is, unless, you are building for say, the Downto...

I am happy to say that the Spring Semester of classes has come to an end at FIU and I am free for FOUR months... That is to say, I will be busy busy busy! at work with my hobbies, potential Learning Assistant job in the Summer A term, and other things. First and foremost, the big announcement is that I am finally able to focus on an effort to bring Tri-Rail service into the Miami-Dade suburbs. This has been much overlooked over the years, as SFRTA probably focused more on the existing improvements. However, as 836 and other east-west roads continue to be a pain in the behind, the sparsely used CSX Lehigh Spur should come to mind and commuter rail should be designed to allow an option to avoid the ridiculous traffic on our roadways. A fanpage has been started to kick off the efforts, which include a very sound and on-point vision of these specific transportation improvements. A dummy Trainz route has been tailored to simulate, to the best of my ability, this service. Traffic pattern...