What do you do outside this hobby?

[steemtrayn]

Ha that is very cool... does it run? You have a creative talent.

Actually, I didn't do it, I just photographed it. I saw it outside an art store near Kingston, N.Y., along with other stuff like this:

[jeffers_mz]

When I'm not railroading, I...

...chase these:

...make these:

http://users.in-motion.net/~jefft/tech/Mapping/afghanistan/index.html

...climb these:

http://users.in-motion.net/~jefft/places/index.html

...play with these:

http://users.in-motion.net/~jefft/tech/index.html

...compete with these:

...ride these:

...jeep these:

...ride herd on these:

http://users.in-motion.net/~jefft/people/index.html

...and wrestle with these:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorentz_transformation

Once in a while I cut more grass than Loathar has, (and mine is taller, too!), work in the woodshop, weed the garden, and today, I picked, prepped, cooked, canned and processed half a bushel of tomatoes.

The other half is ready to go, first thing tomorrow.

It keeps me out of trouble...most of the time.

 

:-)

[ezielinski]

When I'm not railroading, I...

...compete with these:

Boy, I forgot about mine.  With all the other stuff I do, I haven't made it out to the range this year.  I used to shoot military "iron sight" competitively with a Colt AR15 HBAR and an HK-91.  Military firearms were my first obsession.  Nothing like unloading a 30 round clip in 5.88 seconds to get the heart pumpin'!

[jeffers_mz]

When I'm not railroading, I...

...compete with these:

Boy, I forgot about mine.  With all the other stuff I do, I haven't made it out to the range this year.  I used to shoot military "iron sight" competitively with a Colt AR15 HBAR and an HK-91.  Military firearms were my first obsession.  Nothing like unloading a 30 round clip in 5.88 seconds to get the heart pumpin'!

Thirty rounds in six seconds is handy if the bad guys are inside the wire, in battalion or better numbers, and you're about to get overrun, but so far, I've managed not to ire the DCC crowd this week, so I'm just sticking to the Highpower definition of "rapid fire", which is 10 rounds in 60 (sitting) or 70 (prone) seconds.

Ammo's just getting to expensive, and in the case of Black Hills Blue Box, non-existant, for much mag dumping bullet hosing "training".

Tell you what, I'll trade you Cudaken's BLI for a crate of M193 ball...deal?

 

[Tracklayer]

I live a quiet life and work a quiet job. I raise dogs, take care of my house and property, try and get along with my neighbors (I did say try...), get out my guns occasionally and target shoot, buy stuff off of eBay I could really live without, fish once in a while in the lake behind my house, do quite a bit of walking in order to help keep my diabetes under control, collect old Wallace Beery movies and older pre 1980s movies in general, hang out with my buddies when we all have time, chase and photograph trains once in a while and what ever else comes along that catches my interest that's not illegal or immoral...

Tracklayer

[jeffrey-wimberly]

When I'm not railroading, I...

...chase these:

I didn't know you're a storm chaser. One of my duties as a fire fighter is the chase tornados and report their position to 911.

[Anonymous]

I work Wed and Sat in a Pawnbrokers Store, the rest of the week I work on my layout, also love holidays away in my caravan and photography.

Spent 25 years as a Wedding Photographer and all being well will be retiring full time at the end of Feb 2008.

[wetidlerjr]

 I am a Signalman for Norfolk Southern (till Jan. 08, when I retire.)

My other hobby that takes the rest of my money after model railroading is shooting rifles and handguns.

[inch53]

Other than model trains and taking train pics, I chase the grandkids I baby-sit. When I get time I do gardening, woodworking, carpentry, camping, fishing and trying to keep the wife happy. Also watching football and baseball on tv or listening on the radio.

I no longer work, but when I did, I farmed or worked on cars, also did a tour with the USAF [got to see the country from 35,000 feet]

inch  

[wm3798]

I'm not an architect, but I play one on TV.  After a number of years working for a builder, I took off on my own doing nothing but residential design.  It's been pretty good to me so far, and since I computerized, it's really been fun.

 

I also do illustration work (by hand) doing commissions of people's houses, historic landmarks, and local oddities here on the eastern shore...

In the name of shameless self promotion, you can get to my business website via my hobby site listed in my sig.  I'm not above designing a basement with a couple of rooms above!

Lee

[GAPPLEG]

I guess I'm just a boring old guy. After my 4 years in the Army. I started working at GE, at the locomotive plant. 38 years I've played with the real things, before the railroad goes out and wrecks them. I work on the computers that keeps the plant running.  Like some I've seen above I too will retire Jan. 08.  Love to read , travel.

[Bill54]

I work for the Fed Govt. as a management analyst.  My hobbies include going to NASCAR races, fishing, and camping.  I go to the races with my buddies and usually go fishing alone.   We camp from March to November.  When camping, my sister and brother in law go with us a lot.  They have their own RV.  My son and his family also have a 5th wheel camper and go with us to several places throughout the season.

This is our camper.  This was taken in June.  My son and his family joined us on this trip.

Bill

[conrail92]

I'll take this moment to share what I am also interested In: Fan of hockey, love to watch The Penguins, Computers; website making, gaming and ect... , I golf a bit, Like to fish and do other outdoors things such as camping, And Railfanning is another big thing I enjoy. Thoose are a few things I do outside this hobby.

[SpaceMouse]

IS this one of those questions that forces us to self assess whether we have a life?

[Hawks05]

Well I don't do all that much with the model railroading. I think about it a lot and that's about it. I also like to buy a lot that I can't really run all that much. I'm thinking about my freelanced railroad at the moment and coming up with a color scheme for that. My apartment at school is right next to the track so I have an up close view of a lot of train action.

I'm a junior at college majoring in elementary education with minors in middle school math and middle school social studies. I have two to two and a half years left. Right now something that is taking up a lot of time is planning for my trip to Ireland next summer to study in Galway and then take two weeks to travel to other places.

I'm also a huge sports fan. I love playing baseball, basketball, and running. I love fantasy football and watching the NFL and NCAA on the weekends. I play for an amateur baseball team and play intramural softball and basketball.

Also I enjoy listening to music. I've recently gotten into the Gaelic/Celtic style. I'm a big fan of Gaelic Storm, Young Dubliners, Amadan, to name a few. Some other favorites are Dierks Bentley, O.A.R. and We the Living (The Profits).

Those are a few of my hobbies. Time to get ready for class though.

[GAPPLEG]

I'll take this moment to share what I am also interested In: Fan of hockey, love to watch The Penguins, Computers; website making, gaming and ect... , I golf a bit, Like to fish and do other outdoors things such as camping, And Railfanning is another big thing I enjoy. Thoose are a few things I do outside this hobby.

Did you see the penguins and the Sabres are going to play an outdoor game Jan.1 at Ralph Wilson football stadium ?  Go Sabres. I will enjoy seeing the "kid" play though.

[Bapou]

Well I play Baseball and collect Baseball cards. I walk my dog named Bapou . I also mow the lawn but I hate that so it's not a hobby! Hopefully next year I can get a job to get more money! {edit} for trains of course!

[Bdewoody]

I am a designer with a civil engineering firm.  My hobbies are building models, mostly aircraft and ships.  I also spend too much time on an online flight simulator called Fighter Ace.  Somewhere in there I make some time to work on my layout and customizing HO locomotives.

[pcarrell]

Right now I work for the local phone company.  I'm going to college and studying theology so that someday I can go into full time ministry work.  In the meantime I have a wife and kids that I spend a lot of my free time with, and I enjoy working on cars and playing guitar.

[secondhandmodeler]

  I own a men's clothing store which is not very busy in the summer.  I have nine hours a day to kill on the computer.  It's amazing what you can learn about your chosen hobby if you study it five hours a day!  Model railroading is my escape from the stresses of work and life.  Music and movies at home are my primary passion.  There is something  about a good movie and a few beers that can wash away a lot of stress.  Upgrading my home theater is a lot more expensive than model railroading.  Modeling is my non-alcoholic stress reliever.  That and working in the yard.  Beer and lawn equipment don't really go hand in hand for safety reasons!

[MilwaukeeRoad]

Conrail12,

My favorite team the New York Islanders spanked the Pens this season.

Also, I golf (just took 2nd in a tournament out of 30), play guitar, basketball (someday I'm going to face WCfan one on one), I like dirtbiking and ATVs (my friend has a track in his back yard), I also like swimming when there is scorching weather.

[jeffers_mz]

When I'm not railroading, I...

...chase these:

I didn't know you're a storm chaser. One of my duties as a fire fighter is the chase tornados and report their position to 911.

 

I started chasing storms as early as age five or six, when I'd head to the backyard whenver a warning was issued, assuming I could do so without my parents catching me. I wanted to see one.

Real chasing had to wait till age 16 and a driver's license. Seen some pretty wild stuff, in addition to getting within a mile of 20 tornadoes before I stopped counting. Once saw something like the beginning of War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise, three electrical hot spots, each with continual CG lightning, two to three strokes at any given time in each of the three hotspots, walking across the open prairie, with truckers on the CB going "I don't know what those things are is either, but I'm not driving out in front of them". Saw bead lightning twice, but no ball lightning yet. Got picked up crossing flood waters, swept sideways, and just barely found traction before being swept down a waterfall into a flooded cornfield. Found a wet spot with a whole bunch of little gullies, leading to one 3 foot wide by 3 foot deep gully freshly carved into the left anchorage of the downstream face of a large earthen dam once, and reported it.

An oval area from the capitol of my state to a small town an hour's drive north is tied for number 3 in the world in frequency of all tornadoes, and far and away number one on earth for F5 killers. Literature suggests thunderstorms reach an electrical peak 15 to 20 minutes prior to tornado-genesis, and if you plot a trace from the center of that oval, 15 to 20 minutes upstream, as the storm flies, just knock on the door and we'll talk trains and storms over cold brews.

Been here 11 years now, 10+ twisters within visual range, or would have been if it wasn't nighttime for some of them. Between the time I bought the land and the time I built the house, a big one crossed this property after wrecking a little town west of me, and I still find pieces of houses that don't match anything in sight each spring when the plows turn them up. It killed two people in a house just like mine a hour upstream, picking up the house, carrying it 200 yards, then smearing it across the ground such that none of the pieces left were bigger than a basketball. It was on the ground for more than forty continuous miles and ended up wrecking a shopping mall a mile north of where I was cowering in the basement with my family at the time. I don't chase at night, it's...counter-productive. If you end up getting chased some night, watch for arc-overs from big power lines, it's about the only warning you can depend on.

The day the pic above was taken, they threw the warning and I first saw this, on stepping outside:

At the time, it was in the wrong place for the issued warning, and I couldn't see any inflow or rotation, so I dismissed it as a gust front, but it later tornadoed a few miles east of here, so now I think it was a wall and beavertail.

The earlier pic should have showed two circulation vortexes, but digital cameras take their time snapping pics, and it was pretty unstable. I don't think it was a true multi-vortex, just a relatively weak circulation trying to organize down to ground level. You can barely see the other suction vortex just to the right of the more obvious one. The inflow into that whole region was incredible, that little piece of virga just about to enter the right side of the wall was clear over by the far right telephone pole just seconds earlier.

As that area of circulation approached my position, I went inside to take cover, and just as I closed the back door, I saw yet another twister on the ground about six miles south of me, for a total of two on the ground and one funnel in less than an hour. That's my record, so far.

If you do this for a living, I bet you have some stories too. Feel free to share.

 

:-)

[medic_149]

FIrst off, here is my other truck

when I am not on duty either as a dispatcher, or emt on the ambulance, I enjoy being outdoors. I love hunting, golf, canmping and fishing.

[Hoople]

When I'm not MRRing, I'm:

Drumming... Drumming... Thinking about drumming... Making up riffs for drumming...

Yes I drum alot. Must drive the family insane.. No soundproof or pads.

I also like to ride my bike...

And go to school...

And try to find a girlfriend... So far it ain't working.

[Dave Vollmer]

Here's me at work in 2003 over Baghdad:

I'm a meteorologist for the US Air Force.  I've served over 11 years and have spent over four of those 11 years supporting Army combat operations as OIC of various combat weather teams.  Here's me in Iraq again with a tactical weather station.

Right now the Air Force has assigned me to NC State University (still active duty, mind you) to complete my PhD in dynamic meteorology.

Now I study upper-level turbulence caused by flow over complex terrain.  Here's an example of my work from a March 2006 upper-level turbulence case.  The parameters are the NCSU1 and NCSU2 Turbulence Indices at 150 millibars:

These indices are combinations of parameters such as vorticity gradient, gradient of geostrophic streamfunction, Richardson number, etc...

My research page is here:

http://mesolab.meas.ncsu.edu/~drvollme/

I passed my PhD candidacy exams this Spring and am now in my final year.  When done I am told I'll be assigned to Kirtland AFB in Albuquerque to work with the Air Force Research Lab.

My druthers is to hopefully get back over into the operations side and earn command of a weather squadron.

My other hobbys include:

GOLF!!!  Running, hiking, biking, etc.  Two dormant hobbies are flying (I have a pilot's license) and Civil War reenacting (Union, of course!).

My family keeps me busy the rest of the time!

[pcarrell]

So Dave V.,

You'd be familiar with the airflows involved in wave soaring.  Flying, particularly sailplanes, is an old passtime of mine.

Here's some links if you aren't familiar:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/miskin/gliding/gliding/x_wave_soaring.htm

http://www.drjack.info/INFO/DELMONTE/toc.page.html

[Dave Vollmer]

So Dave V.,

You'd be familiar with the airflows involved in wave soaring.  Flying, particularly sailplanes, is an old passtime of mine.

Here's some links if you aren't familiar:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/miskin/gliding/gliding/x_wave_soaring.htm

http://www.drjack.info/INFO/DELMONTE/toc.page.html

Philip, great links!  I'll have to "favorite" them!

[pcarrell]

No problem.

[Lillen]

THERE IS LIFE OUTSIDE THIS HOBBY???

Oooooh, I am sooo there!

My personality is one where I am essentially obsessive/compulsive about anything that appeals to me.  At first it was Astronomy, then Karate, then my wife, then long distance and competitive running (I know....yawn!), then Astonomy as an adult, then grad school, then my work as a military psychologist, and now it is model trains and steam engine history.  It has always been full bore all the way.

So, I do have a life, but it comes in stages.  Very intense stages.

-Crandell

 

I couldn't help recognizing my self in this. I do things in massive bursts of energy, lasting several years until another hobby or interest takes the mainline so to speak. I never forget the old though and they are always with me. I used to be long distance runner. I got home from work, as a mailman who ran and biked all day and then run an additional 7 miles, each day, even in blizzards even though I had to walk then. My other passions have included and still do, Astronomy(I have a nice Meade telescope), war gaming, and of course history, which I'm now divulging my self further in as I'm getting my education ready to become a teacher. The last year it's been trains. I have probably read 200 books about American trains the last year even though I study two educations at once and work part time as a truck driver for the post office.

 So, I understand what you say Crandell, I'm just like you in that regard.

Magnus

[Lillen]

THERE IS LIFE OUTSIDE THIS HOBBY???

Oooooh, I am sooo there!

My personality is one where I am essentially obsessive/compulsive about anything that appeals to me.  At first it was Astronomy, then Karate, then my wife, then long distance and competitive running (I know....yawn!), then Astonomy as an adult, then grad school, then my work as a military psychologist, and now it is model trains and steam engine history.  It has always been full bore all the way.

So, I do have a life, but it comes in stages.  Very intense stages.

-Crandell

 

I couldn't help recognizing my self in this. I do things in massive bursts of energy, lasting several years until another hobby or interest takes the mainline so to speak. I never forget the old though and they are always with me. I used to be long distance runner. I got home from work, as a mailman who ran and biked all day and then run an additional 7 miles, each day, even in blizzards even though I had to walk then. My other passions have included and still do, Astronomy(I have a nice Meade telescope), war gaming, and of course history, which I'm now divulging my self further in as I'm getting my education ready to become a teacher. The last year it's been trains. I have probably read 200 books about American trains the last year even though I study two educations at once and work part time as a truck driver for the post office.

 So, I understand what you say Crandell, I'm just like you in that regard.

Magnus