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The Columbus Garden Railway Society
November Online Newsletter Volume 11 Number 11 Table Of Contents |
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){kind=small} Pizza
all around |
Mike Walls |
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Thirty
plus CGRSers braved the cool October temperatures and overcast skies in Grove
City while running trains brought by various guests on Tom & Patty Uhlig's
layout, which as with most CGRS railroads is a work in progress. |
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| Dues increase; Dues are due | Richard Abler |
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Some things change, some things stay the same - for a while. Of the many
things that have changed over the past seven years are the costs to CGRS in the normal
course of doing business. One of the things that hasn't changed in the last seven years is CGRS annual dues. CGRS dues for 2003 will be only $2 a month or $24 for the year. That's still very reasonable and somewhere around average. Based on a small survey of dues for other societies, annual dues ranged from $10 to $50. Those new members who have already prepaid next year's dues will be "grand-fathered" under the old dues rate. Bring your checkbook to the next meeting. Alternatively, there's a dues the membership application page, which is good for renewals also. Send it in now before those pesky holiday bills come due! |
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| The Plant Manager | Barbara Abler |
| Back next month! |
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| Next Meeting in Gahanna | Jim Nicholson |
| Our RR is in the infant stage as we have no landscaping and we are on
boardwork, but running. I have always been a PRR fan, so we do have some steep grades,
which puts engines to the test. We have two main lines with the intent to build yards and longer runs in and around existing landscaping. This has been a dream since the early 90's when large scale trains began to appear in the Nicholson home starting with an Aristo Caboose "B&O" for our youngest son. Meeting: If the weather is bad for the 2 to 5 PM meeting on Sunday, November 24th we can just have the meeting in our family room and the hearty engineers can run their own trains to their hearts content. Refreshments: We will have a cooking fire for hot dogs, marsh mellows, etc. and we will have soft drinks, hot chocolate, etc. ------------------------------ |
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| See Holiday Trains at the Huntington Bank | Richard Abler |
) Marking its 11th year celebrating the holidays is the miniature train
display in the lobby of Huntington Bank, 17 S. High St. Eight LGB trains and a trolley running
on more than 300 feet of track can be viewed from 7:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday beginning December 2 and running
through Dec. 31, and from 1 to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.More than 50 pounds of imitation snowflakes are used to simulate 600 square feet of snow on the display. Paul Busse, train display expert and designer of Applied Imagination in Cincinnati, created the display, using natural materials such as pine-cone seeds, leaves, tree bark, twigs, fungus, and moss. Featured buildings include a 6-foot replica of the Frauenkirche (Church of our Lady) in Dresden, Germany; an 8-foot-tall castle inspired by the 19th-century castle built for Bavaria's "Mad King" Ludwig II; and a waterfall pumping 600 gallons of water an hour. Visitors can register to win an LGB train set, with train , track and transformer. Winners will be selected in early January. -------------- [Our webmaster, Peter Wine, will assist Paul Busse in setting up the display again this season.] The easiest way to get to the display is to park in the State House garage and take the underground passageway to the ground floor of the Huntington Bank complex. Go up one floor to the train display on the main floor. It's worth the trip! - Ed.] |
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| Conservatory RR car decorating contest | Richard Abler |
| CGRS members are invited to decorate a car in a holiday theme for display
and running at Franklin Park Conservatory (FPC). The theme for the holiday show this year is
"Nature of the Season." Natural products will be used as decorating materials wherever possible. The holiday exhibit at FPC will
open right after Thanksgiving and run through January 5th. Members are invited to decorate a piece of FPC rolling stock or one of their own. FPC rolling stock will be available for pickup on or after November 1st, first-come-first-served. The decorated cars will need to be returned to FPC no later than November 25th. If you choose to decorate one of FPC's cars whatever you do to the car must be temporary. That is, the FPC car must be able to be returned to its original condition. If you choose to decorate one of your own cars you can, of course, do whatever you want with it. However, FPC would like to keep it and run it during the several weeks of their holiday exhibit. There is a limit of one entry per member. Prizes will be awarded in several categories such as best use of theme, best use of lights, best use of plant materials, people's choice, ... In addition to their regular hours of 9 to 5 Tuesday through Sunday FPC will be open for Candlelight Nights on Wednes-days from 5 until 9 PM during the exhibit. They will use hundreds of votive candles to illuminate the beautiful collections, add lights to the train garden, put some small conifers in there and add natural materials to decorate model houses as well as refurbish the existing birdhouses. The annual poinsettia tree will be on display and the cafe will offer some specials. FPC is planning to allow visitors to judge the train cars to determine the People's Choice Award. This judging will be done the first weekend of the show, Nov. 29-30- Dec.1. Award winners will be announced the following week. Our contact person at FPC is Vicki Wilker, Exhibits Developer. If you have questions you can email Vicki at vwilker@fpconservatory or call her at 614-645-5945. |
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| Holiday Gift Ideas | Richard Abler |
| In our ongoing effort to make your garden railroading life easier around the
holidays, we offer here a few last-minute gift suggestions for Hanukkah, Christmas,
Kwanzaa, or New Year's. True Value's truck/bank for this year is a red 1946 Dodge Power wagon. Doors and hood on both sides open. It has a bin in the bed, right behind the cab, that holds nuts, bolts and screws. Then 2 barrels, one had a reel of wire on it and a coil of something gray, sheet metal? Then a big wood box (the bank but the coin slot is in the end just above the tailgate. You lower the tailgate to get the coins out.) On the box is a tool kit, saw, hammer, a level sitting on something, a little pile of boards, maybe. There is a towing hitch and a pushing bumper in the front. Gerry can on the rear of the running board. (Contributed by Margo Lemke). A video tape of six holiday railroads is available from our webmaster, Peter Wine for $20. See more information on this tape on his website, www.holidaygardenrailroads.com or call Pete at 937-219-5017. Another great last minute gift suggestion is the video tape of CGRS railroads open for the LGB National convention here a couple of years ago. The video features 14 railroads (one indoors) and is professionally edited. Get yours from TMC Video Productions, email ronaldmayer1516@yahoo.com or call 614-901-8004 And for the railroader who has everything, there's always a genuine CGRS logo sweatshirt. We will have a supply of these at the next meeting. Call Jim Kimmel at 614-890-8173 or email him at jimbarbkimmel@cs.com. Pick one up from Jim for only $21 or have Jim ship one directly to your front door for $3.50 extra. One size XL fits most. |
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| Cincinnati Home & Garden Show Tickets at Discount | Amy Wiedenbein |
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Bill Logan got this email letter recently.
If any of you are interested in tickets for this show, let me know. [Ed.] Show hours, garden photos, and exhibitor lists by clicking on our website's
link below. In doing so, you'll notice that if you choose to come the second weekend,
you will get two shows for the price of one: you can enjoy "Shopping for Gardeners" at the JUNIOR LEAGUE OF
CINCINNATI GARDEN MARKET with over 100 retail booths. |
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| Shell's garden railroad on "cover" of new CDROM | Richard Abler |
) Those of you who had your railroads open for the
pre-convention tour this past June should by now have gotten two complimentary CDROM discs of photos
of all the garden railroads open for that tour.If you take a closer look at the photo on the "cover" of the second disc youıll see in the background a photo of Jim & Lorinda Shell's garden railroad. Nice going Shells! I'm not sure about the photo on the cover of Disc One. The photo discs are available for purchase through the Large Scale web site at www.largescaleonline.com. |
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| The Death Railway Bridge | Shirley Green |
| The most emotional experience I've had in a long time was my visit to
Kanchanaburi in Thailand. It is 75 miles northwest of Bangkok and not far from the Thai border with Burma. This is where the Death Railway Bridge is,
or as we know it, The Bridge on the River Kwai. Kwai is pronounced like "Quack"' without the "ck". This bridge spans the Khwae Yai River. It is called a memorial bridge because no one seems to know which bridge of many is the exact one the book was written about, and popularized by the movie. Some say the bridge that inspired the novel and movie was farther north and spanned the mightier Kwai River, but that bridge no longer exists. The memorial bridge was bombed several times in 1945 by British bombers. The bridge is contoured with a series of elliptical spans, with the fourth, fifth and sixth spans having been destroyed by bombs. At the close of the war they were replaced with two larger rectangular ones, with -- believe it or not--large printing on them: "Made In Japan". It's the history behind it that is important--not the actual movie bridge, whose story was mostly fictional. The materials for the bridge were trucked in from Java by the Japanese Army during the occupation of Thailand. The first bridge was built entirely from wood in 1943, but within the same year a better bridge of steel was constructed. It is estimated that 16,000 prisoners-of-war died while building the Death Railway to Myanmar (Burma), of which this one bridge was only a small part. There were 10 miles of bridges. Building of the railway began in Sept. 1942 and Japanese engineers thought it would take 5 years to link Thailand and Myanmar by rail. However, the Japanese army forced the POWs to finish the 250 mile meter-gauge railway, with two-thirds of it through Thailand, in 16 months. Most of the railway was built in lousy terrain that required high bridges and deep mountain cuts. The story goes that a Japanese brothel train inaugurated the completed line. The River Kwai Bridge was in use 20 months before the Allies bombed it in 1945. In Thailand it is known as the Death Railway Bridge. Only one POW is known to have escaped, an English soldier, but a few were still barely alive at the end of the war. They and the monks have told the story and donated things for a small museum that shows how they had to live as prisoners. The number of POWs who died during the Japanese occupation is horrifying, but the figures for the laborers, mainly from Thailand, Myanmar, Malaysia and Indonesia, are even worse. It is reported that 100,000 Asian laborers and 61,000 allied prisoners-of-war lost their lives from beatings, starvation, disease, thirst, the heat, and exhaustion (working 18 hours a day), while building the miles of railway and bridges. Some say 160 miles and others say 250. Today not much remains of the original railway because non-Thailanders plus the British carried off most of the track to use in their own construction projects. What is called a railway museum is near the bridge. The outdoor museum, unless there was more that I didn't see, has only a steam locomotive used right after WWII and a Japanese supply truck that could run on both roads and rails, plus a big allied bomb that was dug from the river. It seems to be the spot that tourists like to have their picture taken. I was pestered with strangers asking me if I would take their pictures in front of the bomb. There were, of course, many stores selling souvenirs and the bridge has lost part of its historical impact with commercialization, but seeing it and walking across it is a sobering experience. The bridge is still in use but walking across it is allowed. There are niches between the spans that provide an escape in case a train passes by, so I was brave and walked clear across the bridge. It is a rather scary walk and I can't really explain why. Probably partly emotional realizing you are where so much pain and suffering went on, and the rest from the water below rushing by. I have heard that not many make it to the other side, by choice. The prisoners did their utmost to do the worst possible job of building the railway and bridges. I examined the way the bridge was built and could see lots of bent nails, broken bolt heads, and boards that didn't match up. I heard it is a very wobbly train ride across all the bridges, with creaking and groaning from the wooden pillars as the train slowly chugs across them. I rode the "death train" for about 5 miles. Thatıs about all I wanted with its swaying back and forth and merchants walking back and forth selling tee shirts, postcards, etc. I got off before it crossed a bridge. It is not the original train from the war days when the prisoners were brought there to work and eventually hauled away dead, but from the era soon after. It's hard to tell what is original and what is tourism, but the graves that mark 7000 of the Allied soldiers who were worked to death was for real. There are two Allied War Cemeteries in Kanchanaburi and I visited the larger and best kept of the two, a short distance from the bridge. There are no American dead buried there because they were all shipped home to Arlington Cemetery in Washington, D.C. I was without a Kleenex and I sure needed one, seeing those rows and rows of 7000 graves and knowing how they died. They are arranged in sections by country--Holland, Australia, Great Britain, Denmark, New Zealand, Scotland, etc. Each grave marker is identical. Polished gray granite, flat, and raised about 7 inches from the green well-tended grass. Each marker has the soldier's name, rank, unit, country, and a short love message. Information was sadly missing from some--only a name. There were 4 Thai workers hand-scrubbing them spotless. Being a garden railroader, this had an impact on me I will never forget. No one will ever hear me complain about the weather or how much work goes into building and maintaining my railroad. |
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| Welcome New Members! | Richard Abler |
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Columbus Garden Railway Society is pleased to welcome the following new
members: Don & Sue Corbin, Mt. Gilead; Wayne & Bonnie Beedle, Baltimore; Charles & Kay Doeble, Sunbury; Jim & Valerie Nicholson, Gahanna; Gil & Cari Schroeder, Delaware; and Ron Roberts, Centerburg. A hearty Welcome Aboard to all! |
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| Logo Sweatshirts Available | Richard Abler |
 Just
in time for cold weather our new batch of logo sweatshirts will be available
for you at the next CGRS meeting on the 18th. These quality sweats have
our crossbuck logo prominently displayed across the front.Pick one up at the meeting and save the $3.50 shipping charge. Call Jim Kimmel if you'd like a new sweatshirt but can't make it to the next meeting. We only have a few that aren't already spoken for. |
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| Deadline for next issue | Richard Abler |
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deadline for the next newsletter is November 15th. Then a few days
later we'll hold a work session to fold, staple, label, and
stamp the newsletters for mailing. All CGRSers are invited to attend this work session which starts at 8pm, and generally over by 10pm. CGRS business matters are discussed and decisions are made. Call (or email) ahead, 614-885-0351, to let us know and verify date and location. |
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){kind=small}
Pizza
All Around
Buy
the 1998 LGB Convention Video!
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