Chicago - AREMA Confernece

This is my fourth time attending the AREMA conference, and this one went much the same as the previous ones, a rather enjoyable opportunity to renew all of my railway engineering contacts and keep up on the research going on and the new ideas being implemented in the railway engineering community. Just like the past three years, the first person I ran into at AREMA was my grad school advisor. It's kind of scary how that always happens but also cool as it gives me a chance to catch up, meet some of his students and ponder going back to get a PhD.

Monday was marked by some general sessions which were not overly interesting but informative. I really spent most of the morning talking to my contacts in the biz and savoring the Corner Bakery cinnamon roll I had for breakfast. Monday afternoon the exhibit halls were open. The quality of freebies was really down this year. However, Trains magazine was there and I had a chance to chat with the editor about the recent change of direction in the magazine's content from historic fluff pieces to more interesting and in-depth industry analysis (not that I don't like railroad history, I'd just rather have an in-depth historic piece than a photo essay with little or no informational value besides some interesting photos). After walking around for several hours, Ron and I grabbed dinner at the Elephant and Castle, yes a chain but conveniently located near the hotel.

Tuesday was a day packed solid with sessions. One of these featured a presentation on double tracking the BNSF transcontinental mainline through Abo Canyon in New Mexico. I'm proud to say that I played a small role in the design of this project which will relieve a major bottleneck on the BNSF mainline.

Amongst all the sessions I had a chance to catch up with kevin, with whom I shared a cubicle in grad school and went on several railfan adventures, including our crazed action filled train journey to and from Washington DC for the TRB conference in january 2001. Kevin is now a Bridge Supervisor for CN (Illinois Central) out of Chicago and looks after all of the bridges in northern and central Illinois. It's a pretty cool job as he actually keeps the railroad running with his staff of building and bridges crews. It would be interesting but I prefer the challenge of railroad design in the office as opposed to the equal yet different challenge of improvising to keep things in shape and running in the field.

Tuesday night was the fancy cleint dinner sponsored by my employer. I was seated at a table with engineers from CP so there was much talk of Iron Rings between courses of the fabulous meals. I still think that somehow I'm going to wind up working for CP someday. The closest I've come so far is helping the MInneapolis office with a design project were a CP yard lead had to be reconfigured where it crossed a freeway that was being expanded.

Wednesday was mostly dedicated to flying home. On time and uneventful. A good trip on the company dime.

Chicago again... transit police take action

I'm in the Windy City again, this time to attend the American Railway Engineering and Maintenance-of-way Association (AREMA) Annula Conference. With a name like that you can probably guess that it's just a swinging time. It took forever to fly to Chicago today from DFW. Amy dropped me at the airport around 11:30AM under bright and sunny skies, which I was glad to see considering that earlier in the week it was predicted that the doom of hurricane Rita would be right over DFW at noon on Sunday. I checked in to discover that my 1PM flight had been cancelled and that I had been rebooked on the 3PM flight. So I had soem time to kill at the airport. However, this game me a chance to ride the new secure-side Skylink train for two laps around the entire airport. It's a pretty slick system and it gives you a great perspective of all the aircraft parked at the gates. Fanatstic if you have an interest in airplanes.

After boarding the American flight to Chicago, we were taxied over to a far corner of the airfield where we stopped and the pilot shut the engines down. Apparently we had not escaped Rita who was now spawning a series of severe thunderstorms across much of Illinois, closing Chicago O'hare to inbound flights. With no place to land, they wouldn't let us take off from DFW so we sat on a far removed lonely taxiway, baking in the hot Texas sun. After an hour delay, we finally departed for Chicago.

The flight was moslty uneventful with the exception of the last half-hour or so when we started to encounter the severe weather ssystems and things got really bumpy. We popped out of the clouds in Chicago moments before landing; the city was completely socked in and rainy. But we were there.

I collected my bags and made my way down to the CTA station to take the L-train to the downtown loop where I was staying for the conference. As I was buying my train pass, a man sprinted past and jumped over the turnstiles leading to the station. Several transit police officers gave chase down the stairs as the man slipped through the doors of a train and it began to depart the station. The officers radioed the opertor to stop the train and open the doors. The train screeched to a halt and the officers boarded the train and performed a car-by-car search looking for the offender. By this time I had made my way to the train and one of the officers waved for me to board. I just happened to enter the car where they were subduing the offender, who was resisting violently. Three officers struggled to place handcuffs on the man. Once cuffed, the offender decided to act like a sack of potatos, goign limp except to snag his feet on the seats in the train car to make his extraction as difficult as possible. The officers literally dragged the man right past me and off of the train, the whole time he was spewing expletives and saying that next time they saw him hed have his piece on him and would blast a cap in their collective asses. As they dragged him off down the platform the doors claosed and the train departed on its 45-minute journey to the Loop.

The rest of the ride was uneventful and I made it to the Palmer House Hilton downtown just after 8PM and checked in to my room. I was surprised to find that it had a nice view of the Chicago skyline and I could even see the Navy Pier ferris wheel. Since the last thing I ate was a Subway sandwich around 11, I went down to the Big Downtown on Wabash under the L-train line for some deep dish pizza. Mmmm good.

Lovely Rita Meter Maid

They remanants of Hurrican Rita that were supposed to plow into the Metroplex ended up passing several hundred miles to the east along the Texas/Louisiana state line. We wound up with lots of clouds here but nothing more than a sprinkle when I was out running errands in Dallas. I think it was actually sunny for most of the day in Fort Worth.

I spent most of the evening going through severla years worth of bills, filing them and discarding the enevelopes and other junk inserts that had been stored with the bills all these years. I wound up with a whole trash bag full of the stuff. I was really quite amazed. I'm still going to need another plastic storage bin to keep all of it though but that will have to wait for another weekend.

Man Before Mars @ Hailey's

After work Amy and I headed up to Denton to catch Man Before Mars gigging at Hailey's. Man Before Mars is a local band and Rodney just happens to be the drummer so that was our main impetus for going to the show. Their first CD, titled the Beta EP and featuring 6 songs, should be coming out soon. It was supposed to be ready for the show tonight but when you are doing everything yourself things happen. Such is the indie life. A small throng took in the show. It's hard to tell how "good" the show was without CD recordings to place the performed songs in context but it had a good vibe to it.

Before the show, Amy and I stopped at Tomato's, a hole-in-the-wall pizza/Itlaian joint on the edge of the UNT campus. It's in what I call Campustown, because that's what we called the smilar area back at the U of I, though I'm pretty sure that every school has their own term for it (ie The Drag in Austin). Anyway, it was a pretty cool place to eat with good pizza and that old school pizza joint atmosphere, complete with an original (non-20th Anniversary Edition) upright Galaga aracde machine. It it wasn't for the very faded original monitor, I would have been tempted to blast some bees.

The Decemberists and Sons and Daughters @ Ridglea Theatre

Tonight Amy and I headed out to the always exciting Ridglea Theatre to see a band that we had both recently become aware of over the past few months: The Decemberists.

Opening for The Decemberists were Sons and Daughters. Sons and Daughters hails from Glasgow Scotland and has a sound that can best be described as Folk-Punk with a liberal dash of Johnny Cash for good measure. Their set was rocking, yet folksy, and their scottish accents were charming yet somewhat indescipherable during some of the faster songs. They seemed like a perfect fit to tour with The Decemberists.

The Decemberists, from Portland, Oregon, have an interesting pop sound that makes extensive use of instrumentation such as accordians and on this album and tour, Petra Haden (formerly of that dog) on violin. The lead singer and song writer holds a degree in creative writing, which clearly comes through in the lyrics and structure of The Decemberists songs, which are more like short stories or old yarns set to music as opposed to rhyming words cobbled together into a repetitive pattern. Their set was upbeat and entertaining, including a rather comical encounter with a gigantic whale. Buy their CD and you'll understand, and you'll like it.

If you want to destroy my sweater...

Still feeling a bit of leftover vibe from the big Weezer show a few days ago, I cleaned my apartment while starting the Weezer DVD: Video Capture Device playing. Unlike a lot of band or music DVDs, this one is actually very good, informative and entertaining. It contains every Weezer video, assorted behind the scenes footage in the recording studio and on tour, live concert footage, live television performances and all sorts of other interviews and nuggest of Weezer goodness. It all has an option commentary featuring Brian, Pat, Karl and Scott (who interesting wasn't in the band for 80 percent of the stuff on the DVD) which is very enlightening even without Rivers being present. The DVD has a cool play all feature which goes through everythign in chronological order, so the whole thing plays out like a complete history of the band, from a scratchy sequence of pre-Weezer 60 Wrong Sausages rocking out Answer Man in 1991, through recording the classic Blue Album in 1993 all the way up to demo session for a later re-tooled album 5 in summer 2002.

Amy came over to my place during the late Blue-Say It Ain't So period, just in time for the Pinkerton Sessions and for me to cook dinner. A few hours later after dinner and dessert and more Weezer than you can shake a stick at, we're still wondering why Beverly Hils went to #1 on the charts but none of these other songs could make it over the top despite good runs into the top 5. Maybe music in general was just better back in 1994 and 1995.

40 Year-old Virgin, never ending pasta and a VW Golf

After a day spent taking care of somewhat uninteresting tasks, Amy and I decided to embark on a alte afternoon quest to see "The 40 Year-Old Virgin". Normally going to see a movie doesn't deserve the billing of embarking on a quest. However, in this case, our good friends at Yahoo! movies indicated that the closest theatre showing the film was the UA theatre in Bedford, located somewhere along the Airport Freeway frontage road not too far from Amy's apartment. We drove over to the area where we assumed the theatre to eb and found nothing. A few loops around the 121 and 183 junction and nothing. Apparently this place is very well hidden. So well hidden in fact that we were still looking for it after the listed showtime at the imaginary theatre had passed.

A quick call to Mr. Moviefone at 444-FILM had us heading up to the AMC 30 in Grapevine Mills where a showing was scheduled about 30 minutes later. Having been to this theatre before, we were pretty confident of its existance and our ability to find it. Exiting off of 121, Amy drew my attention to what she termed a crazy little car up ahead in the lane next to us. I looked over and saw, of all things, a 1996 VW Golf Harlequin!

For those of you not in the know, the Harlequin is a VW Golf with body panels in a mis-matched color scheme and is one of the rarest of recent production VW cars, with only 264 leaving the factory, all during the 1996 model year. The Harlequins were created by constructing a set of four VW Golfs, one Chagall Blue, one Tornado Red, one Ginster Yellow and one Pistachio Green, and then swapping body panels between all four of the cars such that no two adjacent body panels have the same color. The result is one of the most riotous production color schemes since the bold two-tones of the 1950s, almost as if the car were made from Lego. The cars also had a special interior with matching multicolored accents on greay cloth. This particular Harlequin looked to be in pretty good shape, although like many of its kind, the green has faded badly and the red had lost some of its pop in its 9-plus years on the road. I wasn't paying close enough attention to determine which of the four Harlequin patterns was present on this example, but it was very cool to see one of these rare and unique cars on the road firsthand for the first time.

After following the Harlequin for a few blocks, we made it to Grapevine Mills for 'The 40 Year-Old Virgin". It lived to its billing and is one of the more clever movies in its sex farce genre, in my opinion. If one thing is for certain it is that I will never be able to discuss bags of sand and whether or not a trunk has enough room for a bicycle ever again without snickering to myself. Time well spent in the theatre.

With our stomachs hurting from laughter, we headed on over to the Olive Garden in Irving for dinner. I did not know ahead of time that Olive Garden had added the "never ending pasta bowl" to its menu, for if I had I wouldn't have had anything for lunch. Nonetheless, I was up to the challenge of hurting their bottom line by eating two plates of spaghetti and finishing about a third of Amy's pasta. Not a bad showing but next time I will be prepared to eat them out of next weeks payroll.

Weezer and Foo Fighters @ Smirnoff Music Center

Weezer coming back to town for the first time in three years! Words cannot express my excitement heading towards Smirnoff. It was Weezer show #4 for me and probably the most entertaining with the shared vocals and other new twists to the act, but each show is special for its own reason. They kind of mangled the Say It Ain't So lyrics but it was interesting to hear the new revved-up Don't Let Go which sounds rather different than the Green Album version. The set order was great as things just kept building up to El Scorcho which was followed by a string of hits that really got the crowd going non-stop. Closing with the cover seemed a little strange but it ended on a light note with weezer taking a group bow at the front of the stage as if they were doing a curtain call instead of just vanishing during the feedback/jamming of the final song as at previous shows. If this was their last show in Dallas for some time, it was a memorable goodbye.

Approximate setlist... order might be off...

My Name is Jonas
Peace
Don't Let Go
Such a Pity
In the Garage (Scott vocal)
Perfect Situation
Why Bother (Brian vocal)
Surf Wax America
El Scorcho
Say It Ain't So
We Are All On Drugs
Beverly Hills
Buddy Holly
Photograph (Pat vocal, Rivers drums)

(encore)
Island in The Sun (Rivers solo acoustic)
Undone - The Sweater Song
Hash Pipe
Big Me (Foo Fighters cover)

Needless to say this had Amy and I pretty stoked, both being Weezer fans and Weezer being one of the things that brought us together in the first place.

The Foo Fighters played after the weez on this co-headlining date. They had a pretty impressive stage show with huge video screens, a mountain of amps and some nifty laser effects. Their set was loud and rocking but I'm so biased towards Weezer it couldn't really compare.

After the show we stopped for some food on the way home, at Whataburger of course, whose logo has a suspicious resemblance to that of a certain band...

I found the middle of nowhere

Today I spent the day in the thriving city of Monahans, Texas. It's really just a dot on the map 45 minutes west of Midland-Odessa, struggling to stay alive after I-20 looped around the town and took away all the traffic that once streamed past the gas stations and businesses along the main drag. Obviously I didn't do this by choice and was sent their by my employer. One thing about working on railway projects all the time is that you are sure to visit some of the most out of the way places. This excursion came coutesy of TXU, who has retained the firm I work for to study the feasibility of adding some rail facilities to its Permian Basin power plant on the outskirts of Monahans.

To get to Monahans, I flew Southwest from Love Field to the airport in Midland-Odessa (or rather in the no-mans land between Midland and Odessa). Coming into the airport, one could plainly see the reason for the existance of this urban area on the nearly perfectly flat plains of West Texas: the landscape of mesquite, sagebrush and circular fields nourished by center-point irrigation systems was covered with a perfect grid of greyish-beige squares, each one containing an oil well at it's center. The flat plain of the great Permian Basin which was once the floor of an acient seabed is now one of the larger petroleum producing areas of the United States.

After meeting with the plant managers and others from TXU, and inspecting the plant on foot in the near 100-degree heat it was time for a late lunch at one of three restaurants in town. The choices were Mexican, Mexican and barbecue we were advised that the barbecue place wasn't very good. So Mexican it was. Just what you want after being scorched out in the heat and need to get back on a plane to Dallas later that afternoon. The food was actually pretty good and sat surprisingly well for the flight back to Love Field. Interestingly, during out time with the rental car from the Midland-Odessa airport, the price of gas had dropped 15 cents from morning to late afternoon.

Bug Swarms and Baby Showers

Today must have been the longest day ever.

I got up at the crack of dawn, check that, before sunrise, to wash the bug in preparation for the big local VW show taking place later on. Car washes are eerily silent at 5AM. Working quickly I was able to remove a fine layer of road grime and the water spots that the sprinklers at Amy's apartment complex has deposited the night before.

Finishing up at the car wash I stopped back at Amy's to grab breakfast and take a quick shower before rolling out to meet up with some VW friends to head to the show. Over at the famous "Happy Meal McDonalds" at Montfort and 635, I met up with Jason, Jesse and one of Jesse's friends to cruise to the show. After leaving the McDonalds, we immediately encountered at huge traffic jam related to contruction at the High 5 interchange between 635 and 75. It didn't delay us too much and we rolled into the show adjacent to Rusty Wallis VW with plenty of time to do all the last minute cleaning before judging.

The BugSwarm show, in it's eleventh incarnation, is one of the larger local VW shows with both aircooled and atercooled VWs in attendance. This year, for some strange reason they feared low attendance and did away with most of the classing structure. This was a let down as this show is often marked by tight judging in closely competitive classes for coveted first place awards. On the upside, it meant that I didn't have to go absolutely crazy cleaning in the already steamy parking lot. In the end, 88 VWs entered the show, with many nicely kept and restored aircooled VWs being the highlight. After what seemed like an eternity in the hot sun in a parking lot with little shade, it was time for the awards and I was lucky enough to take home a trophy for Top 5 New Beetle. Hot, but happy, I headed back to Amy's place for a shower.

After my quick change, I jumped back in the bug and headed out to south Fort Worth to meet Amy at a baby shower being held for our friends Rodney and Stephanie. I arrived just a few minutes before they opened our gifts, which in a way was anticlimactic since they had kept such a sharp eye on their baby registry at Babies 'R' Us that they almost knew what everybody had given them. It was still cool however, thanks to Ryan's comic relief and a steady supply of cake, cookies, cupcakes and other goodies.

After the shower was over and heading back to Arlington, we met Rodney and Stephanie for dinner at Cheddar's over by their apartment. I had a literal mountain of chicken fingers, which was helpful in fueling me as I helped Rodney assemble a crib and several other pieces of furniture and baby-related items from the shower. Meanwhile, Amy helped Stephanie sort through a mountain of baby clothes and by 2 in the morning, what had been a giant pile of opened presents in their dining room was all carefully put away in order. Amazing. I was absolutely wiped out.

Chilling

The A/C is now back in the bug and my wallet is about $500 lighter. It could have been a lot more costly, however. Never underestimate the value of a friend who works for VW and can get good hook ups with the service techs and parts guys.

Laborious

I just got back to my place this morning after riding the TRE to downtown Fort Worth from Centreport. It was cool to have Amy drop me off in the Kiss 'n Ride area at the crack of dawn, almost like we lived together. Of course, after dropping me off she was going home to crawl back in bed for a while longer and I was actually going to go to my place and get ready for the day instead of both of us going straight to work.

The rest of the long weekend was pretty good, filled with lots of getting little things done and, among other things, finally watching my copy of "High Fidelity" on DVD. Amy had a clunky VHS copy that we had watched on previous occasions but this DVD is far superior. All of Jack Black's sarcastic record snob comments are that much more crystal clear. I really like this movie, though I'm not sure if it would crack my Top 5. For one thing, it made me aware of Stiff Little Fingers, one of the only pioneering 70s punk bands that is still around touring to this day. Often referred to as "the Irish Clash" and a big influence on the sound of Green Day, SLF are known for the rousing album "Inflammable Material" which contains the punk standards Alternative Ulster and Suspect Device. I saw SLF play at Trees in Dallas last fall and despite being well into middle age, they put on a smashing performance playing new material and tearing through their oldest classics as if it were the first time they were playing what have become anthemic to fans of punk. In an interview last year, a reporter asked them if they ever got tired of playing Ulster and Device at every show. The lead singer responded that yes, sometimes they don't feel like it, but they know that at every show, there is somebody who has never seen SLF before and is there to hear them crank out Ulster and Device with the wild abandon of old. Bands who refuse to play their standards or classics live in concert should take note.

A Gas

Today Amy and I continued on our effort to conserve gas by catching the TRE to Dallas around noon. At Union Station we transferred to the DART light rail train and rode it up to Mockingbird Station where we caught a movie at the Angelika. Then we took DART down to Cityplace and walked over to Bally's to run and workout. While running around in circles on the cool but somewhat irregular track that runs around the perimeter of the floor of the office building Bally's is located in, I caught the finish of the Illinois-Rutgers game on the various televisions hanging from the ceiling. An Illini triumph in overtime! After the workout we headed back to the DART train and took it back to Union Station where we waited for the next TRE admist countless Anime charaters who had no doubt wandefred over from the Anime convention at the Dallas convention center about a block away. We caught the TRE and arrived back at Centerport around 7 without incident this time.

After eating dinner, Amy had "The Good Girl" on Netflix so we watched it. The movie, which stars Jennifer Anniston is surprisingly good. The Retail Rodeo store is very Texas and serves as a very amusing backdrop for the story. Add it to your queue if you feel game.

Left Behind

Thanks to the incredbily high gas prices, today Amy and I began an effort to make use of the Trinity Railway Express (TRE) for our trips to Dallas. Fortunately, Amy lives a couple of exits down 360 from the Centreport TRE parka nd ride station, so she can use the TRE to travel to work in Dallas. She had used this option on this particular manner, so I decided to take the TRE to Dallas after work to meet her for dinner.

I boarded the TRE at the downtown Fort Worth ITC station, rode to Dallas and made the transfer to the DART light rail train without incident. I met Amy and we had a great dinner at the Texas Land and Cattle near her workplace. WE husteld back to the DART station but the light rail train seemed to take forever to get back to the Union Station TRE transfer point, arriving mere minutes after the 9:30 TRE train had departed. Thankfully it wasn't the last train of the night but we did have to wait some time for the 10:20 departure, the final train of the night that does not operate all the way to Fort Worth but instead terminates at Centreport.

The train departed right on schedule and we found ourselves in a completely empty coach, save for one other passenger seated at the opposite and and facing way from us, allowing us to get cozy for our trip through a largely dark trackside landscape to Centreport. With the darkness outside and the inside reflections on the window, it was difficult to tell that we were arriving at the Centreport station until the train lurched to a stop and the announcement was made. We scurried down the stairs of the bi-level cars just as the doors were closing and the train started moving again. We'd missed our stop, and so had the other passenger at the other end of the car who hadn't reached the doors at that end before they closed either. The train picked up speed as it headed west and the other passenger used the emergency call box to contact the crew, who was alittle annoyed at their presence. As the train stopped in a passing siding to let a coal train that had followed us out of DFW pass us, they came back through the cars looking for stragglers. Finding us, they maintained that they had been at centreport for two or three minutes, which was an obvious lie. I think that they knew they had cut the stop short thanks to the coal train following close behind and us and in part due to the fact that after making the stop and taking the train back to the maintenance facility they were free for their long weekend. Fortunately the TRE trains layover at a maintenace facility east of Centerport, meaning we would need to back through the Centreport station again as the crew put the train away for the night. Once the coal train cleared the main, the crew backed up to centreport and quickly dropped us off. It was a slight delay for us but a serious problem for the other passenger. He was a bus driver at DFW heading to the airport to begin his overnight shift and the delay meant that he missed the last connecting bus to take him to work. Not wanting him to have to walk the couple of miles to DFW, we gave him a lift in the Mini over to the airport and he was very thankful.

Probably my most eventful commuter train ride ever.