The Royce Files

It was a frigid Saturday in early December, but I got the family out of the house for a little under an hour to meet Jolly St. Nick outdoors by the old Great Northern depot in Fergus Falls. Otter Tail Valley railroad is own by short liner Genesee and Wyoming via their purchase of Rail America back in 2012. You can see the RailAmerica paint on the GP9 diesel. Caboose OTVR 101 with OTVR 1483 Caboose was posed with the Geep for the Santa Train festivities. The caboose formerly ATSF (aka Santa Fe). The caboose is typically parked nearby the depot or further down the tracks near some maintenance facilities.   For a cold day there were plenty of youngsters out to meet Santa. In fact there was a line. GP9 in RailAmerica paint OTVR 1483 is a GP9 originally ordered by Nickel Plate . Built in 1959 it went through a few different owners prior to coming to the Otter Tail in 1997 including Norfolk and Western and Dakota Minnesota and Eastern.

Since I've moved into a house I have been able to enjoy an old hobby-model railroad. Quite a few of my pics of trains and scenery have shown up on Instagram or Facebook. The hobby seems like it is dying out to an extent- or has the potential to flicker out of popularity. I see fewer and fewer trains at the stores these days and much less a the hobby shops out this way. RC seems to be the hobby of choice. To find some supplies I need to head down to the Twin Cities and make a stop through Scale Model Supply to get what I need. Used to be a few stores that sold trains in the 'Go. In fact one of them used to be located where my church meets. Google pages say there is one- but on the map it is a house . There is an annual train show in October. I digress. Well, I had HO trains growing up. But just got into O scale this year, mostly because the size would be good for kids and my dad had a collection of Lionel trains. But before I set up to borrow my Dad's tr...