The Royce Files

240 miles separates where I am at and the Twin Cities. Almost the same amount separates my home base and Winnipeg. For 70 less miles and reduce my drive time by 1.5 hours, I can get to St. Cloud, the Granite City. Once again I spent some time at the Granite City Train Show a few weeks ago. This train show has been going on for a while- maybe like 10 years- and it has been my go to show for buying model trains and railroad related items. Last spring they moved the show from the Armory to the River's Edge Convention Center in downtown St. Cloud. The convention center allowed much more space and a lot more parking. This spring the show was just a bit sparse. I noted quite a few vendors were not present. I overheard amongst the chatter that the Newport Club was having one of their sales the same day down in Woodbury. I have written about that one and attended last year. Woodbury is a large draw and Twin Cities based vendors may find it more attractive than lugging their wares up ...

It being Model Railroad Month , I should write about this interest of mine. It was only in the last two years that I have come to revisit this hobby from my past. As a child I got into model railroading with an HO train set I got for Christmas. It was a special Campbell's Soup edition set made by Life-Like. Eventually a train table was built, more track, switches, and a city load of buildings were acquired. I still own it, but it has not been run for years. It was sort of an incomplete set up. I was never any good at scenic. I just liked to run the trains. I digress. A few years ago I decided to revisit the model train hobby but this time in O scale. Which now brings us to this entry about the Granite City Train Show . Out in the Go there is very little to choose from for model railroading supplies. There is one shop that carries a bit of train stuff. There used to be another but it closed up about a decade ago. I actually attend church in one of the shop's previous loc...