Blathr Wayne Lorentz

If you see a train honk at a horse on Main Street, you might be in Houston.

Have you ever wondered what the top of a light rail train looks like?

Youʼre welcome.

Dessert tonight is some sorta chocolate mousse cake. Amtrak makes a fine sorta chocolate mousse cake. If my wife wasnʼt sitting right there, I would ask this sorta chocolate mousse cake to marry me.

Wait, I found the description:

Flourless Chocolate Torte: The perfect paring of bittersweet chocolates, topped with semisweet chocolate truffle ganache and drizzled with chocolate sauce and whipped cream.

I donʼt know why it has a hole in. Maybe thatʼs where the calories go.

Tonightʼs Amtrak appetizer is going through an identity crisis.

“Lobster crab cake: Pan-roasted lobster crab cake served over a Farro, butternut squash and craisin salad with Sriracha cream.”

So itʼs got lobsters pretending to be crabs, and cranberries pretending to be raisins. Doesnʼt matter — it was really good.

Thereʼs a stereotype along the lines of “People in Houston wonʼt ride transit.” If that was true, then Metro wouldnʼt have had two million disembarkments at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo a couple of years ago.

My observation so far has been that the people who are most against transit in Houston are people who donʼt live in Houston, or if they do, they live on the fringes, and not in the actual city part of the city.

Iʼve long moaned about how Houston is a city that would rather spend a lot of money tearing things down and rebuilding them, than spend a little money maintaining what it already has. Since Iʼve returned to the city, I see it over and over again.

This is the latest example. These are warning lights that were embedded into the stop lines of streets that cross Metroʼs Red Line downtown. They were pretty neat when the train first ran, taking the flashing lights usually hanging beneath a grade crossingʼs crossbuck, and putting them into the street, itself, nice and tidy. The resulting wigwag light pattern both alerts drivers to the approach of a train, and also lets them know where to stop.

That is, if theyʼre working. Which theyʼre not. None of them work anymore. I wrote to Robert Gallegos, my elected city councilman asking what happened to them.

Not only did he not respond to my letter, his office didnʼt even acknowledge its receipt. Having previously lived in Chicagoʼs 42nd Ward under its very responsive Alderman Brendan Reilly, Iʼm surprised that a local politician would simply ignore a constituent. I guess Mr. Gallegos doesnʼt need my vote.

While I agree that the former mayor Brown deserves to have a train car dedicated in his honor, I donʼt like when these sorts of awards are bestowed on people while theyʼre still alive.

For a bit of nostalgia, I bought some HO-scale model trains from Goodwill. I donʼt have a big enough apartment for a train set, so this will live on the kitchen counter until Darcie decides to stop indulging me.

I give it about ten minutes.

Iʼve done the math and it would cost the same for me to get on an Amtrak and never get off as it would to rent a new apartment.

Even with the extra expense of getting a room on the train, because meals are included if you have a room. Plus someone comes in and changes the sheets every day and gives you fresh towels and snacks. Probably every week or so Iʼd have to have a layover day in a hotel so I could do laundry. But otherwise, I could do a continuous loop of Chicago → Seattle → Los Angeles → New Orleans → Chicago. Luckily, Iʼm not affected by motion sickness.

A lovely day at the Southern Nevada Railroad.

Most people donʼt realize that there are other “areas” in the Nevada National Security Site besides Area 51. This railroad engine used to haul nuclear rocket engines around Area 25 before it crashed.

In other news, “nuclear rocket engines” are a thing.

Hereʼs whatʼs on the plaque: