LCCA Convention

Anders and I are attending the Lionel Collectors Club of America convention in Kansas City this week. We drove down here from Minneapolis on Sunday. He likes our room at the Hilton with two queen-sized beds. He made a point to tell his folks (via Facetime) that his bed had four pillows!

Yesterday, we had a day-long tour including a train ride (of course) and a couple of museums. BNSF offered to host an LCCA special train ride out to Topeka and back. A bus picked us up at the hotel. The first part of the tour was of the Argentine switching yard, the second busiest rail switching yard, after Chicago, in the U.S.

Among other things, we saw the "hump." A continuous stream of arriving train cars is pushed up one side. Each is decoupled and rolls down onto a fanout of separate rails, each of which becomes a consist of cars headed for new destinations. As each car rolls down, it is switched onto the appropriate set of rails. There are some fascinating technologies that retard or speed up the cars, depending on requirements for coupling appropriately with the other cars in the consist.

I like the livery (paint scheme) of the BNSF engines. One of my favorite electric train engines is a BNSF diesel engine. The train on which we rode had a BNSF engine at each end and a set of passenger cars in between. One engine pulled us to Topeka and the other returned us to the Argentine yard.

I know all of you have seen graffiti on train cars, and although I almost always dislike this disfiguration of the cars, I realize that some of the graffiti can be colorful, even artistic.

In the afternoon, we were bussed to St. Joseph, which I have to say is a very interesting city and one worthy of being a fun destination for a weekend or longer outing. There are magnificent homes there, lots of history, and several good museums. One that we visited was the original eastern headquarters of the Pony Express. Here is Anders outside that museum. We earned quite a lot there about the short-lived effort to provide rapid delivery of mail to the west from St. Jo.

Sacramento was the endpoint of the route for the mail delivery. Very young, very lightweight (think jockeys) men rode segments of the route. Buffalo Bill Cody was a rider for a short time. The service existed for only 18 months before being overtaken by rail and other services.

Next we visited the Patee House Museum, which houses an eclectic collection of city and western history, including some very nice pieces. Originally a fine hotel, the building was overtaken during the Civil War by the Union Army as a headquarters in the west.

Associated with the museum is the home of Jesse James, the notorious bank robber.

Inside you can see the original bullet hole left behind when James was killed (or so it was claimed). A nearby painting depicts the event. Anders was quite intrigued by this tale of a "bad man."

There is an old, operating carousel inside the museum, so Anders had a ride. I should have stopped in Story City, Iowa on the way down here to have him ride the famous antique carousel there. (Click here for information on that one.)

We are interacting with other electric train buffs and will be viewing various train layouts and taking other tours over the next several days.