You’re welcome!

It’s been rough.

Covid, stay at home orders, record unemployment, riots and for good measure inflammatory rhetoric from the White House making things ever worse. It is enough for one to easily sink into abject despair, if it were not for the little routine habits and quirky hobbies we have. My other half has gotten into jigsaw puzzles in a big way and I, of course, have my model trains.

So I have been working on the garden railroad. A lot of G scale rolling stock I have not looked at in a long time has come out of storage. Locomotives that needed repairs have been fixed. Unfortunately, I also found that some of my equipment was beyond redemption and had to be discarded.

But whatever is in working order I have been running, to the great delight of a lot of our neighbors. Many people nowadays take walks and it seems that my garden railroad has become a “destination” in the area. Folks of all ages seem to enjoy watching the trains and, when I am outside in the garden, always have a kind word and thanks for me. This morning was a bit different.

In front of our gate, we found a message scrawled on the sidewalk with various colored chalks: “Thank you for the train. Big thank you”.

No idea who is thanking us, but you are most welcome. Just glad to bring a bit of warm fuzzies to the neighborhood during this time.

The train in question: A PIKO G scale Deutsche Bundesbahn TEE set, “Helvetia”. The diesel powered original (Class 601 or VT 11.5) ran from 1957 to 1979 between Hamburg, Germany and Zürich, Switzerland:

All photos by Ralf Meier (iPhone 11)