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...

The previous post has generated quite a bit of praise; now for the FEC edition;) You know you're a FEC railfan when: You can't handle railfanning in any temperature below 32º F.  You're up at the butt crack of dawn for some FEC action, which can vary depending on which part of the mainline you live in. North end: 226, 224, 905 and 109; Middle corridor: 109 and 210, with a local here and there, and South end: 335, 121, and 123 You eat, sleep, and breathe EMD. You don't believe that GE has any form of existence and deny that the railway has bought the Tier-4 Compliant ES44C4s Your girlfriend is named Ashley You can actually call a locomotive "Pinky" Freight cars are termed as Dead Loads You bow down to the gods (ie. President Hertwig) every time the Azalea, St. Augustine, and Power Car pass on the butt end of trains like 101 and 226 Nightlife for you includes clubbing around the destinations I mentioned in the previous list, as well as Fort Pierce, Ja...

Saw a kind of dated list called " You Know You're an Idiot Railfan if " and I wanted to incorporate South Florida into it... that is because we have developed a railbuff culture and our own railfan humor pretty unique and distinct from the rest. This is all in good humor not to be condescending towards anyone, and it is NOT to suggest that we would be idiots, much less the original list that this was inspired from. So here goes - and I'll update frequently: You know you're a South Florida Railfan  when... Nightlife for you is either Delray Beach proper, Hollywood, Midtown (as of 2014), or, if you can handle it, Ft. Liquordale, and maps to a certain FEC milepost number Your Friday night hangouts are the White Lumber Lead, Fort Lauderdale Airport Station, Hollywood Blvd, or Hollywood Amtrak Station You just have to check out East Rail, Pompano Market, or Downtown Spur when you're in the area You repeat and know verbatim the Power-Assisted Switches on the...

The Flame Yellowish Orange conversion project I considered back in 2013 is in full swing with two CSX General Electric MOC locomotives converted and scaled down. Scaled down as in, they were too big to scale and built very juvenile-ish-y-however you put it... The GEVO is PF-ready, the C40-8 not quite so as something else will need to take in the IR Receiver for it. The latest plan is to make my widecab SD70MAC a dummy unit and either lash the two up elephant style, or make them both trailing units; so that the IR Receiver can fit in. Note that a Battery Box can't fit in an EMD engine under normal circumstances. Two non-train-nor-quite-town LEGO videos are in the works, one which will be posted immediately.One of them is a special pre-Valentines video and the other is a special ceramic model which symbolized my mom's earlier return from Turkey for serious family business... which went smoothly and everything is swell now. You can see both MOCs at the same time once I g...

The Florida East Coast Railway has just announced that it will purchase twenty-four GE ES44C4s from General Electric Transportation . It sounds like the once-stubborn Shortline by the Shoreline finally listened to the pleas of its folks and fans and broke down about 55 million buckaroos to get some clean locomotives. The ES44C4s have different traction mechanisms than the popular ES44AH. This follows semi-official word from Jan 15 that the purchase was to be green-lighted. Many folks are had upset that the railroad is no longer a virgin to GE, and are puzzled that they are getting more engines than they need. It needs to be remembered that as it is, the railroad is power short. Plus, the SD70M-2s, which had left the company in dissatisfaction are going to be handed back to EMD soon. Needless to say, this might have been one of the draws  for the decision to switch to GE, absent the fact the engines are in some ways obsolete per ECH. They are also going to need it for the Port ...

Folks, with the new year setting in, I feel that it is time to bring forth new ideas and promote changes. I have been adamant over the past couple of months to push for a service expansion of Tri-Rail west to the Malls . Wait... that remark sounded a bit nerdy, right? In other words, I feel that the 25-year old commuter line needs to grow, and most importantly, incorporate parts of the city that promote nothing short of economic benefit to the service. It sounds all too easy to speak, but this push will strongly encourage the use of infrastructure that is quite similar to what exists for Tri-Rail (SFRTA) as it is to create a strong economic engine that will benefit South Florida travel for years to come. The first phase of my proposal, and the key focus of my video that will be put up really soon, is a three-station west expansion to greater Sweetwater. It seeks to use four miles of the CSX Homestead Subdivision and five of the seven miles of the Lehigh Spur, which is the stretch ...