{"id":6206,"date":"2020-05-19T14:36:05","date_gmt":"2020-05-19T20:36:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/?p=6206"},"modified":"2020-05-19T14:36:05","modified_gmt":"2020-05-19T20:36:05","slug":"all-aboard-for-lamy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/2020\/05\/19\/all-aboard-for-lamy\/","title":{"rendered":"All Aboard for Lamy"},"content":{"rendered":"

We lived in an apartment when I was a kid, in the federal housing projects on First Street in Bayonne, New Jersey.\u00a0\u00a0 We did not have much money, and we did not have much room.\u00a0\u00a0 One Christmas, I decided I wanted a set of Lionel electric trains.\u00a0\u00a0 Santa brought them to me, good guy that he was.\u00a0 It was years later that I learned that they were hand-me-down trains that had originally belonged to my cousin Richie.\u00a0 He was a few years older than me, and had outgrown toys.\u00a0 By then he was more interested in girls.\u00a0\u00a0 His train set was pretty basic, to tell the truth.\u00a0 A circle of track, a transformer, a locomotive, a couple of cars, and a caboose.\u00a0\u00a0 None of the really cool cars that Lionel was making in the 50s.\u00a0\u00a0 I had friends who lived in houses whose train sets occupied their entire basements, with a whole town, a mountain, tunnels, bridges, all kinds of cool cars that did stuff.\u00a0\u00a0 My train went in a circle around the Christmas tree, and when the tree came down, it was time to put away the train set for another year.\u00a0\u00a0 Eventually my trains vanished unaccountably, and I later learned they had been handed down again, to another cousin, one who was a few years younger than me.<\/p>\n

Perhaps these experiences during my formative childhood years gave me a deep-buried case of Train Lust.<\/p>\n

Or maybe it was my middle initials.\u00a0\u00a0 I remember when I first started going to SF cons, there were a lot of guys named George around.\u00a0\u00a0 George Zebrowski was “George,” Gardner Dozois informed me.\u00a0\u00a0 George Alec Effinger was “Piglet.”\u00a0 So I would have to be “Railroad.”\u00a0\u00a0 Jack Dann still\u00a0<\/em>calls me that, half a century later.<\/p>\n

Whatever the reason, yeah, it’s true.\u00a0\u00a0 I bought a new train set.\u00a0\u00a0 Well, me and a couple of friends and partners, Bill Banowsky of Violet Crown Cinema, and Catherine Oppenheimer of the New Mexico School for the Arts.\u00a0\u00a0 All three of us are involved in Santa Fe’s resurgent Railyard neighborhood, at the heart of which is the old, defunct Santa Fe Southern Railroad, which hasn’t run regularly for years.\u00a0\u00a0 The SFSR only ran eighteen miles, from just behind my theatre the Jean Cocteau down to the old historic depot in Lamy, New Mexico.\u00a0\u00a0 But it was a great fun ride once upon a time, and Bill and Catherine and I think it could be a great fun ride again.<\/p>\n

The JOURNAL NORTH has all the details, here:<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.abqjournal.com\/1456291\/working-on-the-railroad-ex-trio-plans-to-revive-train-service-between-santa-fe-and-lamy.html<\/a><\/p>\n

It is going to take a lot of work, more than a few bucks, and a fair amount of time to get the railroad running again. \u00a0 There are tracks and trestles to inspect and repair, old historic coaches to restore to their former splendor, a dead locomotive to bring back to life. \u00a0 And the coronavirus has slowed the process way down. \u00a0 But sooner or later, we do hope to have the old Lamy Line chuffing and puffing once again, and we have all sorts of fun ideas for the future, live music and murder mysteries and train robberies and escape rooms and… well, we shall see.<\/p>\n

And best of all, we won’t need to pull up the tracks when Christmas is over.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

We lived in an apartment when I was a kid, in the federal housing projects on First Street in Bayonne, New Jersey.\u00a0\u00a0 We did not have much money, and we did not have much room.\u00a0\u00a0 One Christmas, I decided I wanted a set of Lionel electric trains.\u00a0\u00a0 Santa brought them to me, good guy that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[218],"tags":[303],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6206"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6211,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6206\/revisions\/6211"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/georgerrmartin.com\/notablog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}